Many people are familiar with Google Suggestions. You start to type in your search item, and a number of suggestions appear. Recently, I began to realize that many of these suggestions are filled with racist, sexist, inappropriate terms. For example, try typing in "why are". The very first suggestion is "why are black people so loud". I was stunned that such stereotypical and racist suggestions would come up on Google, a search engine used by millions of people every day. Another astonishing thing I found was that many of the suggestions that appear on the images site are suggestive of child pornography, another obviously horrible and sick thing. If you type in "racism is", Google gladly finishes it with words like "good", "natural", and "funny".
After finding all these horrible Google suggestions, I decided I would voice my opinion and contact Google and
complain about the problem. I know my complaint wouldn't get all the inappropriate suggestions deleted, but I would have felt better if I could get my opinion on the problem to the source. After 20 minutes of trying to find a way to contact them, I decided to to just blog about it. I thought it was interesting that Google makes I difficult to contact them about a complaint or even just a comment.
Do you think Google should be held responsible for the suggestions on their website? Is it their fault or is it because of the people who use Google? What do you think Google should do about it, if anything?
I have noticed this same thing, especially when we were doing our herstory projects, our group noticed some sexist terms that google wanted to finish the sentance with. I'm not exactly sure but I would think that the only reason those things pop down is because people have searched them in the past (which if that is true, is just sick). I think that google should definitely do something and filter or go through and eliminate derogatory suggestions. And I definitely think that google should be held responsible for the suggestions of their website.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure if Google should be held responsible for the suggestions that its browser makes. If you set your preferences to safe search, 'inappropriate' things should be filtered out, but if you don't then Google should not filter. If I am not mistaken, the suggestions are just the most common searches. Personally, I'm not sure if I would search for these things, but I can't help but feel like Google, which is a platform for other websites, editing it's results even with the filters off is censorship.
ReplyDeleteGoogle Web Search Help says that "We try to filter out suggestions that include pornographic terms, dirty words, and hate and violence terms. If you encounter a term that should not be suggested, please let us know by posting in the Google Web Search Help Forum." It also says that you can turn off suggestions in your preferences page.
ReplyDeleteI tend to trust Google that they are doing their best; after all, their motto is "Don't be evil". However, in this case, I don't think that they are doing enough to stop inappropriate content from showing up. I went on their so called "Help Forum" and it was terrible. I couldn't find a thread about removing suggestion terms. If they really wanted feedback, they should make a discussion category dedicated to feedback, not "Unexpected Results". I think that if we got a group together, maybe we could all post enough on the forum to be heard.
It's interesting to read these responses because it shows how crowdsourcing can work. I am pretty confident that Google is simply reflecting whatever people are searching for. See: http://www.google.com/trends for more examples. I actually wish the post was more about that and what it says about the English-speaking world.
ReplyDelete