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wut?!?

/pol/ is losing it's shit about this.

• google American inventors: get pics of a bunch of black inventors
• google White man white woman: get a bunch of pics of mixed race couples
• google European people art: get a pics of black people in renaissance clothing

I saw that last night. Why is Google doing that?

It's not just Google, IT'S EVERY SEARCH ENGINE! LIEK WUUUTTT!@#

I'm not racist, but this? This is soooo weeeird…

Holy shit, its real? Hahaha, i wonder how long before leftist media finds out. This is gonna cause a serious shit storm.

That;s really weird.

Seems like Google tried to write an algorithm that promotes black/minority results in general searches (like for a school project if you're looking up American inventors) but it went haywire and now it's blatantly exposing to everyone exactly what they tried to do. Awkward if so.

What's with Google and trying to control the flow of information lately? First Jigsaw Bot, now this? What the hell?

If you google image Art of Europeans some of the results on the third row is West African sculpture. The forum hosting those images only mention "European" as part of a user's opinion that medieval African art rivaled European art.

Regardless of whether Google's trying to politicize certain search results, this is just slack. If I google European art, I want art from Europe, not Africa.

Never knew the Europeans were so diverse in their art

The best part is that very few of those results are actually art of any europeans.

I googled european artists and inventors and got what I asked for.
I googled asian people art and got what I asked for.
I googled european art and got what I asked for.

I googled european people art and got portraits of black people drawn by europeans.

Are they using it as a testrun?
Or is their some real weird niche out there…?

Remember, Google isn't the ones doing it. If you go to Bing and type the same question, you get the same results.

Y'know, if you want to fix the algorithm, the search should go only to "european black art" imo. It's win-win for everyone.

Bing has copied Google's search results in the past.

Reminder to avoid double posting when you can avoid it (which you could, given the 30 minute timeout hadn't happened), thanks

This is… really embarrassing for Google, no matter how you look at it. If it's intentional (or semi-intentional) then it just means they're pushing politics when people want good results. If it's not, then it just means their search engine is messing up.

Wonder if they'll fix it soon. It's obviously not exactly what people are searching for when they search "european people art" (as well as the others that were mentioned by Starsream), so the search engine is blatantly flawed.

OK I think I can explain this. Many of the top results are from http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/, which has a topic of "People of Color in European Art". What's likely happening in this case is that it's picking up on "European", "People", and "Art", and giving back results based on that. Searching it with quotations brings up nothing similar, which supports my hypothesis. As for why people are searching it, I'm guessing it's because they're looking for portraiture and don't know what to use for search terms.

For "American inventors", it's likely because it's picking up on "African-American inventors", which skews the results as it ignores the "African-" part. With "white man white woman", it's likely not seeing "white" and "woman" as being connected, plus white is already used in the search, which makes it really search for "white man woman". Since race usually isn't involved unless people are talking about interracial relationships, it skews results toward pages that talk about them. "White couple" brings up more accurate results, so if you need a picture of a specifically white couple, use that instead.

@Peacock Are you sure? I don't recall Google doing this before, and it seems suspicious that Google is misinterpreting these common phrases in a way that brings up African-Americans so consistently and almost unanimously, especially considering Particles post regarding that one result that only had European in a forum post. If it were only some or even half, I could see your explanation being plausable, but 80-90% of results? That seems like more than a algorithm quirk to me.

Yes, it's fairly conclusive. There are people talking about how that specific blog comes up first in all search results because of the specific wording of the search term.

No conspiracy, everyone can safely move on. It's a mountain out of a molehill.

If you just Google "european art" like a normal person, you get much more "mainstream" stuff: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=european+art&biw=1366&bih=659&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs6d_ejqjPAhVqCcAKHVo7DNoQ_AUIBigB

But adding the "people" sounds weird, so Google assumes you were going for "people of colour" or something similar.

The "white man white woman" one is a similar phenomenon. Because you bothered to include "white", Google assumes you're looking for more specific things, like "the white man in an interracial relationship". Try just googling "couples" and see what you get instead ;)

Search for couples (Oh look, loads of white people! :D)

Search for man+woman (Toilet door signs … ?)

They probably do have some sort of algorithm to try and showcase black inventors, since I've searched variations such as "US inventors" and even "Yank inventors", but it's not exactly in a "hurr durr mighty whitey is ded u guys" conspiracy level. Graham Bell and Edison are still the first options to select from the little drop-down.

Alright, so that does explain it to at least some degree. But does anyone else still find it at least a bit strange the degree to which word "people" seems to bring up posts from this one Tumblr blog? I tried "british people art", "french people art", "german people art", and "spanish people art", and each and every time it showed up among the top results, though with not nearly the same frequency as "european people art". I'm not in any way an expert on how exactly Google's algorithm works, particularly how much website traffic factors in when it's looking for a very specific set of words. But if anyone is, I found this info on that blog's numbers, so… yeah.
And to be clear @Eglamore, I object to Google manipulating results like that in any way shape or form. Of course they're a private company and can do whatever they damn well please (though perhaps there is some kind of law against covert manipulation or something on the books), but it's still shady as fuck, and if they're doing it just a little bit now they could certainly decide to ramp it up in the future.

And to be clear @Eglamore, I object to Google manipulating results like that in any way shape or form.

Probably shouldn't put too much trust in a massive corporation like them in the first place. They exist to make money at the end of the day. They're going to publicly appear to push or promote the ideals that are most valuable for them.

To be clear, I also object to this, but are you really that surprised?

Of course they’re a private company and can do whatever they damn well please

Yup. That's how big Murican companies work. Good old non-interventionist free market.

but it’s still shady as fuck, and if they’re doing it just a little bit now they could certainly decide to ramp it up in the future.

Slippery sloping a bit here, but I'll agree it's a real possibility and that I'm opposed to the idea. But I reiterate – did you really trust Google that much before this? They are going to modify search results to reflect what they believe their users want – it's a similar concept to the whole targeted ads thing etc.

Well have you actually searched "european people art" before? It's difficult to say this is a recent thing if we never Googled this until now.

To be clear I'm against them manipulating searches if that is what's truly going on here, but on what basis can we compare and conclude that?

If Google was intentionally pushing forward POC stuff, then "people" would function as a trigger in all searches. But searching for stuff like group of people gives regular results, nothing POC or BLM.

It's really the "people" part which nobody would use in a regular search for European art, and will fuck up your search, pushing up whatever comes closest to using all search terms. No online article about European art or European artists would flaunt the word "people" all around, but a blog focussing on POC in European art most surely would. If you search for European art, click the top results and ctrl-f for "people", you get no results.

Mare wrote:

Regardless of whether Google’s trying to politicize certain search results, this is just slack. If I google European art, I want art from Europe, not Africa.

Then why would you search for "european people art"? I'd say smarter searches would be European Art, which gives no oddities.

Roy wrote:

For “American inventors”, it’s likely because it’s picking up on “African-American inventors”, which skews the results as it ignores the “African-” part.

That is correct, because if you search for "american inventors -african" (no quotations), thus removing the "African" part of the search, you might get a couple of Asians but mostly white Americans.

And to give a final example of how Google can fuck up. If you search for "European People Art" (quotation mark included), this is what you get:

Sure, this is an after-effect of the reactions due to the search results, but if Google was truly pushing POC art, why would they not push down all the Trump stuff for a similar search? Seems kinda counter-productive. Why is POC art worthy of panic, but Trump propaganda not?

Conclusion: Spooks.

This is nothing compared to it being basically confirmed they skew results for Hillary. At least this can be attributed to a variety of factors while the Hillary thing is straight up Orwellian.

On the matter of Trump, because they are doing it this way:

this is from 2 weeks ago…

When did an opinionated Tumblrista get to be CEO of Google?
Because I don't remember this shit happening several years ago.

I have no idea why a lot of black people appear if I search "european people art", maybe google was trying to promote equality but ended up messing up the code

That doesn't really explain why they would put Trump merchandise within a presumed POC art search manipulation.

Related question: Does anyone know this controversy has raised enough spread to warrant an article?

The Google search results for the phrase with quotations implies it got traction. If so, I'll ram something together.

If it manages to make /pol/ nuts, then we should

I tried this now and Google suggests to me:

Hillary Clinton is…

1) Losing her mind
2) Awesome
3) A robot
4) Dead

Yahoo gives me:

1) Evil
2) Dying
3) Wrong
4) Pro-Israel

What's happening here?