Google & Net Neutrality: Our Skewed Search Engine
As our most relied upon search engine, it is almost too easy to place all of your search-worthy trust into Google. This default home page is the basis for all of our knowledge, as well as the probable source of our knowledge to come. It’s for these reasons alone that we should call into question the credibility, neutrality, and trustworthiness of the results in the searches Google generates.
In an article from Bitch Media, Safiya Umoja Noble writes how searches for terms such as “black girls” or “women’s magazines” produce a severely skewed set of results under Google’s search standards. Reflecting her frustration with the way search engines only further retrograde progress for social justice in the identification of women, she details how searches for “black girls” bring up mostly pornographic pages, with little to no prevalent results shedding positive or historical light on African American women. These morphed searches demonstrate wholly how our search engines don’t always show us what we want them to, but what was pushed in front of us by large corporations.
Noble’s examples are not the end of the long-lasting list of Google’s sexist search results, and an article by Chris Morran adds onto this discussion of biased filtering. Morran discusses the powerful advertisements from the United Nations that symbolize and emphasize both the sexist search results on Google and the massive gender disequality that is still so prevalent today.
Personally, I find these biases frightening; I use Google about ten times a day, and so do the majority of the college students around me. The average Google user, like myself, has an unspoken trust with Google: you get fast answers for the (assumed) complete truth. But this is a major problem, because if the average Google user is under the assumption that those top Google results are the most reliable, most relevant sources available, they are going to perpetuate the underlying biases and sexism that those sources support.
Unfortunately, these types of results are not a promising factor for the future. If anything, Google is only becoming more and more streamlined into every person’s life, as their main hub for searching, emails, videos, and photos. As a student at a University, my entire life is Google. Kids born today and in the past 15 years have had Google as the answer to their every question, and this leaves an incredible amount of power in Google’s hands. If left unquestioned, I believe these consequences could lead to the hinderance of progress as a nation struggling for complete togetherness and fairness.
