Search Engine Journal – Don’t You Know This?

So this morning we find an article by Roger Montti posted on Search Engine Journal, Why Google Shows Black Doctors in a Search for White Ones. This is a long, convoluted article that tries to dissect what supposedly went wrong with the search or the algorithm.

“Google’s Danny Sullivan tweeted an explanation of why it appeared that Google favored images of African-American doctors for search queries that were explicitly about Caucasian doctors.

“On first glance it appears that either Google is broken or perhaps that the search results are showing an underlying bias toward images of African-Americans.”

They posted a copy of a tweet by someone who wonders out loud, “Who hacked the Google algorithm?”

These people claim to be search engine professionals, and they don’t know the answer to this question? Here at Infinity Dental Web, we’re scratching our heads as to how they can not know this answer.

The concept, according to Google documents as exposed by Project Veritas, is called “algorithmic unfairness.” According to this internal Google document:

“For example, imagine that a Google image query for ‘CEOs’ shows predominantly men . . . Even if it were a factually accurate representation of the world, it would be algorithmic unfairness because it would reinforce a stereotype about the role of women in leadership positions.”

I wrote about this extensively in an earlier blog post, Does Google Still Deliver the Best Search Results. What I said then was, “In other words, Google sees its role as having grown from delivering us information about the world as it is, to wanting to shape the culture as they in their wisdom think it should be.”

Roger Montii, this is pretty basic. You need to wrap your mind around what is going on at Google.