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Comment by tango24 | Hacker News Reader

What is your suspicion here?

I think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result, implying political motivation. It's pretty clear that it's just an artifact of the collision with the common search term "african american scientists". The result for "united states scientists" more or less proves this to be the case.

by "overrepresentation of black scientists", in my case it means 100%.

Huh I see Einstein and Feynman in the top few results. Again, if you just switch the term to start with "united states" there are literally zero black people in the top results so seems unlikely it's a conspiracy.

I doubt it is, but I also don't fault someone for thinking so. Einstein showed up after 3 scrolls.

For me, "there are literally zero black", was not true. predominately not black, but Washington was in the list. I don't mean to be pedantic, but I take 'literally' seriously

I meant zero before scrolling. Einstein and Feynman show up before scrolling at positions six and seven when I search "american scientists" and the other results are black american scientists of one field or another. No black people show up before scrolling when I search "united states scientists". I guess results vary by geography or history or something.

Same

> I think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result

I don't think there is any overrepresentation in the result set, though there does seem to be a small cluster at the top (the top 5 and 9 of the first 12, but then a sudden drought.)

Hmm I'm not so certain about that. US inventors returns 5 out of the top 10. They are

George Washinton Carver, Elijah McCoy, Madam CJ Walker, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Garrett Morgan

How many of those do you suppose are actually in the "Top 10" of US inventors

The first ten inventors I see when I search for "US inventors" are:

Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Charles Goodyear, Lewis Howard Latimer, Henry Ford, George Eastman

... which does corroborate OP's "American inventors" hypothesis.

First off I think you searched for American Inventors not US inventors which seems to collide with African American because engineers are smart but computers are stupid.

Secondly google search results are a best guess based on prior search history and other data about you about what you want to read right now given a term.

You wont anywhere find a universal fact about what google themselves thinks about anything without reading material written BY google and not generated results from its search engine.

I think this is correct.

If you Google search "African American Scientists" and "African American inventors", you get almost the exact same photo list as "American Scientists" and "American inventors".

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