Google’s top search results promote offensive content, again
Google’s search algorithms have been haphazard for a
long time, but over the past year we’ve seen a number of incidents where
top results are spreading wildly inaccurate and offensive
material. The latest has Google highlighting an offensive meme from the
sjwhate subreddit as part of its search result for the “gender fluid”
query. The offensive image is the first thing you see for the term,
alongside a Wikipedia entry.
The slip-up comes just a month after Google briefly gave its “top stories” stamp of approval
to two 4chan threads identifying the wrong suspect in the recent Las
Vegas mass shooting tragedy. This latest search result problem appears
to be related to the company’s snippet feature. Featured snippets are
designed to answer queries instantly, and they’ve often provided bad answers in the past. Google’s Home device, for example, used a featured snippet to answer the question “are women evil?” with the horrendously bad answer “every woman has some degree of prostitute in her.”
So why does this keep happening? As my colleague Adi Robertson points out,
Google’s original PageRank algorithm was built to deliver the most
popular and influential results for any search query regardless of
accuracy. The algorithm has developed into providing instant results,
and we’ve seen those algorithms manipulated by third parties or duped by inaccurate sources.
The dominance and popularity of Google means people use
the company’s name as a transitive verb to define information searches.
And with little competition, Google becomes the de facto source for all
the answers we seek. People trust Google more than most tech companies,
as highlighted in a recent Verge survey, thereby giving its search results and featured snippets an enhanced sense of authority.
While Facebook understandably receives a lot of attention
for the “fake news” epidemic, Google’s search results are a big part of
this problem. Google has an important role to play in managing its own
platform and internet search results correctly, and over the past year
its shown it has a lot of work to do. We’ve reached out to Google for
comment on this recent search result mishap, and we’ll update you
accordingly.
The Article was Published on : TheVerge
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