Hacker News Reader

Comment by retox | Hacker News Reader

Do a Google image search for "new actress" without the speech marks. Or "American inventor"

The “American Inventor” result is easily explained by being a substring of “African American Inventor”. No conspiracy necessary, it’s just a substring hit.

What does this even mean?

It’s a trope that’s supposed to show that google searches are biased in favour of black people. If you search for American inventor you get lots of image hits for black inventors. The real reason for this is that American inventor is a substring of African American inventor, so google shows results containing the superstring.

The odds that this is how their search operates are nil.

But it does operate this way, of course. It is just the same effect that causes "earth society" to mostly show results about the superstring "flat earth society"

Why would you assume that simplistic (and not fault tolerant) approach is why you get that result?

Occam’s razor?

Google really needs to improve their search quality then.

Searching for razor doesn't give results for occam's razor.

Because there aren’t that many pages about it. Also a white American inventor would probably just be referred to as an inventor, without reference to race or nationality. A black inventor would be seen as out of the ordinary, and so be referred to as an African American inventor, stacking the deck in favour of those results.

This is a guess: I don't think that most people would think "American inventor" when someone says "Inventor"

Strangely it's a "substring hit" that only works for scientists and inventors. The substrings stop matching when you look for "American economists" or "American philosophers".

Works for American doctor, gives a decent number of black results for American soldier. Exactly what is it going to take for your conspiracy to be disproved? Does Eric Schmidt need to float down on a cloud and walk you through Google’s algorithm?

Some explanation from Product Expert (Google Search)

> Regarding the search for [white american inventors], the results would reflect the way the images are labelled. Check the image descriptions and you will find that the image results all contain some of the words you searched for. Maybe the webmasters who label images of inventors have no interest in the colour of the inventor's skin!

https://support.google.com/websearch/forum/AAAAgtjJeM4xP2ts6...

!g on American Inventor gets me the TV show plus pictures from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com