Valleywag
Google's sexism
Google has given it's official response to claims that the search engine's spell-checking algorithms are sexist. Until recently, if a user typed in dynamic phrases — such as "she invents" — Google would suggest an alternative, such as "he invents." For other verbs, such as follow, the search engine proposes a suitably deferential female protagonist. "Google develops its own spell-checking algorithms based on sophisticated machine learning methods, using cues from aggregated user input, Web documents, and many other sources," a spokesperson told the Chicago Tribune. The translation? It's the world that's sexist; we just index it.
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3:32 PM on Tue May 15 2007
By Nick Denton
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4 comments
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"It's the world that's sexist; we just index it."
Its actually a serious argument. To do otherwise is a slippery slope, is it not? Solving for content problems by tweaking the search engine/index is just putting lipstick on a pig.
This brings up the MIT sexism question again: if men do in fact invent more things, is it sexist to suggest that "she invents" is a typo?
And of course, the irony: feminists are critical of stereotypes and statistics that they women are bad at math, but instead of proving this WITH statistics, they invoke equality.
Just goes to show that Google hasn't cracked the search nut like most pundits believe. A natural language search engine wouldn't react in this manner.
@fatbastard: Google has a heuristic based on statistics. Natural language search doesn't work yet.
It's almost like you're responding to the current state of first person shooter AIs by saying that when loaded into a mech, they don't work well. Take these things out of the sandbox they usually play in and they'll fail.
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