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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls".

I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn.

So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are looking for them, or (2) show pornographic results to people searching for innocent stuff.

...Or maybe (3) built a perfect profile of every user and just show them what they want. But do we want to go there?

(You might be thinking that "black girls" is such an innocent term that Google should be able to determine that it's non-porn, but then the question merely shifts to less popular queries.)

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Isn‘t this precisely why safe search was invented? I find the „unprofessional hairstyle“ example much harder - you‘d have to first classify all pictures according to minority groups, determine the mix of minority group mix located in the search locale of the user, decide whether the mix should be local, regional, national or international in this case, and then correct the bias in the results accordingly. Seems quite heavy handed and I‘m not sure the results will always please those who seek more social justice. Is Google already doing such a thing now?

Yes, but I'm surprised that there isn't some self correction there. My understanding is that one of the primary metrics goole uses is which link you click on last after searching. If the majority of people searching are white and all people want to see people who look like them, then the top result should be white. But I expect that when black women search, they will keep scrolling until they find the picture that they were looking for. Wouldn't Google want to identify each significant subgroup for a query and put each of their respected "best" search result near the top, and not just show the top 10 results for the majority subgroup?

My (totally uneducated) guess is that most people typing "unprofessional hairstyle" aren't looking for a make-up example they can follow: they're looking for funny pictures.

So if the top ten results are black women (or Asian guys, or British royalties, or whatever), and if they look funny enough, then users will be satisfied and stop looking further. So whatever pictures that went up there first stays there.

Do you want google personalizing your search results^H^H^H^Hspying on your search and browsing history, or giving you the overall best result^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarginalizing your minority culture?

Should be ^W, no?

I wish the article had included screen shots of search results for "white girls" and "Asian girls".

Would there be any less porn? I strongly doubt it.

"Asian girls", maybe. But "white girls" definitely would not have returned porn.

But it would include Russian prostitutes.

"white girls" returns stuff about the movie white girl

"Girls" is the HBO show

"Asian girls" is porn lite

"Black girls" has no porn for me. Various sites about black girls (black girls code for example)

It depends on your search history, actually.

I tried "black girls", "white girls", "asian girls" - and also "asian boys" etc. - in various accounts, some of which were used when browsing porn (i.e., home accounts vs accounts used at work), and in both google and bing.

In accounts where porn was browsed in the past, porn results were over 50% for all of the above. In others, porn was absent.

Excellent research! You should post this as a root comment so it has a chance of rising to the top.

That's because the results in the article are from 2011.

White girls not so much. But Asian girls returns lots of pic sites that aren’t porn but are suggestive.

Btw, black girls no longer returns author’s screenshot so google has changed results since this article.

To do these kinds of tests reasonably, you need to do it from an incognito window or private browsing and clear all history between every search.

Even that might not be enough to get the original results, as there are also signals based on location.

It seems a given that any search that does not include explicit "pornographic terms" should never return pornographic results.

What are explicit "pornographic terms" ?

If you search for girls online are you typically looking for clothed ones? That's a rational assumption but many searching for girls are not looking for the same thing as you might want.

Yeah, that's much harder to define than people generally assume. Cleavage, for example, is generally perceived as sexy, but seldomly as pornographic.

In general, in our Western society, the whole breast seems to be fine, as long as the nipple is covered up. So, what they could do is show you nipples, if you actually search "nipple". But maybe you're looking for male nipples, which obviously are not pornographic at all, so that doesn't work either.

"Vagina" and "penis" have enough educational material behind them that that may actually be what you're searching for.

"Pussy" could be a cat, "dick" could be a Richard.

Which is another aspect, making this harder. Our society loves using non-sexual words to refer to sexual things.

I suppose, if you actually throw in the word "porn", there's hardly ever going to be a scenario where you were not looking for pornographic content, but it's not entirely impossible either.

A nice example is the bird called "great tit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit) - "tits" being one of the classic "pornographic words" (e.g. 1972 "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television"), so when someone is searching for "great tits", is it reasonable to assume that they want dirty pictures or should the search engine return just the birds?

If data shows that the majority people searching for "xyz" desire to find sexual results with this query, then "xyz" apparently is a sexual term. It's certainly plausible that this might be true for the world "girls" in many contexts.

I think anyone that's looking for porn on Google is too lost to save. Polite society has moved on to better SERPs like Bing, Yandex, and thou that shalt not be shared.

And that more than 90% of all searches with "girl" are for porn. Google already killed most of its porn-lovin' demographic with the beheading of Google Videos in ~2009.

Also, I don't understand what you're trying to say here. I'm reading sentences, and I comprehend them, but there lacks an overarching idea to bring it all together.

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