Romanians are Smart or How to Change the Google Autocomplete Suggestions | Hacker News Reader

Romanians are Smart or How to Change the Google Autocomplete Suggestions

seomoz.org

89 pointsjtallant59 comments

The moment this campaign started, I felt it was unnatural. Just drive through the center of Bucharest once, and you'll see just how smart Romanians are. I'm not one of those that feel like that they don't belong to this country, but we still have a long way to go.

Funny thing is that even romanian searches would yield 'Romanians are rude' and similar suggestions. Cause we are, just like other nations around us from the former communist countries. After aprox. 50 years of living under constant pressure that what's yours will be taken away, now everyone sees everyone as a potential threat. It's our/their blood. And it'll take a while until things will change. They're changing, but I'm not sure campaign like these will make a big difference.

The problem with Romanians (imo) is low self esteem and negative self image. Like you said, after many years of psychological abuse it's hardly any surprise. If they could only see their potential ... unfortunately, most times you have to be unplugged from negativity to see the positives.

> The problem with Romanians (imo) is low self esteem and negative self image

Hmm interesting. I always thought them to be smart and persistent, rather than having "low self esteem". Romanian programmers are one of the best out there. But they also create some of the worst viruses as well. Maybe years of being bullied and managed by everyone creates a distrust of any laws or authority. But I still don't see the negative self image thing though...

My comment was about the population in general. They focus on the negatives (perceived poverty, perceived lack of culture, perceived mediocrity, etc) while ignoring the positives. Similar to how an above-average looking girl beats herself down because her nose is not perfect, or something else trivial, while ignoring and downplaying anything nice or even extraordinary she may have. Programmers, working usually in a global market, are more aware of their standing, and hence have a better self image.

My favourite was when it used to complete "chinese people are" with "aliens." extremely odd.

I also enjoyed it recently when the top result for "define an english person" was the wikipedia article "cunt." That one smacked of deliberate organisation.

Anyway, aren't the search autocomplete suggestions based on the distribution of n-grams in google's index, as much as in the search terms?

> I also enjoyed it recently when the top result for "define an english person" was the wikipedia article "cunt." That one smacked of deliberate organisation.

The funny thing about some of these is that they become victims of their own success - the bomb doesn't work now because all the results are for blogs, reddit, etc talking about the bomb.

> Anyway, aren't the search autocomplete suggestions based on the distribution of n-grams in google's index, as much as in the search terms?

My wife would know for sure, but I believe it is more based on search volume. When you type "hacker news" you get:

hacker news search

hacker news mobile

hacker news api

Pretty clear that it's getting those from search volume, not n-grams.

I regularly do a Google search for "Ofcom MCA maps", a rather specialist subject that takes you to the following page that's impossible to find on the website itself: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/radiolicensing/mcamaps/MCAs.h...

When I first searched on this, Google didn't suggest it at all, and the page itself was half-way down page 1. Now, it's up there at the top (even when logged-out). I can't imagine very many people search this term--so I can only assume my regular searches have pushed it into the search engine's consciousness.

I tried with a bunch of nationalities and every one returns equally negative results for "[Nationality] are". I don't know why people get so upset about stereotypes. I bet almost every one is stupid/lazy/ugly by the opinion of random strangers in the world.

the opinion of random _dumb_ strangers.

And the phenomenon is not limited to nationality: the first suggestion i saw once for "how do i" is "how do i google something".

We must all remember that not only the rest of the world have stereotypes, they are also on average dumb (and that we are rest of the world to most people).

Part of the problem is that humans tend to focus on negative things. If you make something wrong, theres always some person there to point his finger at you, if you make something great, you don't always getting praise for it. It's the same with your memories, you tend to remember bad times more and longer than good times.

Technically the auto-suggestions are not stereotypes since they are not anybody's opinion - they are only what people are searching for.

Technically the auto-suggestions are not stereotypes since they are not anybody's opinion - they are only what people are searching for.

And that makes me wonder why the first two searches for "italians are" are:

-italians are jews

-italians are not white

for the first search, according to a couple of articles i've found, there were in 2003 less than 50k jews in italy (of 60mil of inhabitants), so a very small part

for the second one, i dont know how to interpret it, maybe black people?

It might refer to the true romance scene about the sicilians:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8XkOYcz3hI

In order to understand why romanians take this so seriously, you need to understand the context. Romania is widely regarded by the western Europe as backward, poor and corrupt. On top of this, Romania has the largest Roma minority in the region ~500.000 according to wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_(Romani_subgroup). The average westerner can't distinguish a romanian from a roma/romani/gipsy although they are quite distinct. In the last 20 years there were several waves of romanian immigrants hitting the western europe, including the Roma minority which are highly nomadic by tradition and very visible in the west because they beg and steal aggressively and live in slums in very primitive conditions. This lead to the association romanians = gipsies, thiefs, primitives etc. The current campaign is a response to these stereotypes, which unfortunately are easily promoted in western europe especially since western massmedia can't pick on blacks and arabs anymore cause that's clearly racist and open racism is not trendy anymore.

I'd say that in my experience, the Roma don't beg and steal particularly worse than any other marginalised or impoverished group. There may be a culture of theft among some of the poorer groups, but that is hardly unique, a culture of theft is extremely common in a lot of widely varied communities around the world, from energy companies to impoverished slums.

In my experience, the general public in the west does not believe and can't believe what an eastern european says about the Roma people, because anything we say sounds like prejudice and discrimination. The westerners simply ignore the fact that these prejudices were formed along more than 150 years of coexistence and although insulting, they describe rather accurately the character and the habits of an entire ethnic group (group which is not as diverse as you may assume). Time will tell you more (cause if I enter details, I will be banned :D).

My experience contradicts with yours.

First of all I'm not trying to paint all gypsies with the same brush. I actually know a couple that are very educated, very honest and very hard-working human beings. But within all the "Roma" minorities, there are sub-groups and not all of them are created equal.

In general in Romania there are many gypsies that are definitely not marginalized and impoverished.

Some of their culture is also part of ours (e.g. many people like their music), their children go to the same schools as Romanians, some of their words became a part of our language, interracial marriages are not at all uncommon (up to the point that for some people their origin is not at all visible) and they also receive lots of subsidies from the government ... they definitely are NOT marginalized. If anything, some sub-groups of this minority are marginalizing themselves.

Also, there are many gypsies that are filthy rich. Come down here sometimes and I'll show you entire villages of villas (i.e. big and luxurious country residences) that are inhabited by gypsies. Those villas come paired with luxury cars too. And some of them still steal, still beg for money on our streets or in other countries, some of them still live in tents in their own backyard.

My experience is it varies site by site, family by family and individual by individual. Stereotypyes can fit cultures but they become fairly destructive (and sometimes even self-fulfilling) when you start applying them to individuals or treating them as rules.

I know quite a few travellers, roma and irish gypsies and the one thing I do know is all three groups are tight and fairly insular, especially from each other. And like any tight groups they are very good at reflecting the attitudes they percieve to be directed towards them.

For the record, I am not from any of these groups and have had relatively few problems with them, when compared to other groups I have interacted with. Drunk anglo-saxon football fans, for instance.

  > ...including the Roma minority which are highly nomadic by tradition and very visible in the west because they beg and steal aggressively and live in slums in very primitive conditions.

Pot, kettle, black.

I did the same. It's puzzling how some suggestions really comes up a lot. "racist" and "rude" seems very common. I get why "racist" would be so common, but "rude" odd. But maybe it tells something about how other people view a new country. I'm guessing that it is very easy to feel another nationality is rude, if you are traveling there and miss some/all of the subtleties of the culture. Or maybe it just tells us that people are easily precieved as rude.

The problem with this is that, unlike traditional Googlebombing which relies on lots of links to a certain page, "Romanians are smart" will quickly drop off the search suggestions as soon as this campaign loses popularity. Gaming search suggestions requires constant upkeep effort.

Is this really a problem though? It would seem "Romanians are ___" is a rare search term as it is--the negative terms are likely old and low-frequency, especially in comparison to this recent surge in positive queries.

This specific instance might not be, but search suggestions could become as problematic as search results. Try "Rick Santorum is ____".

That's if you're competing in your own niche. What if you wanted to positively influence the search results that came up for your company? "igul222 i buy so much in a year that i want a discount" "igul222 write testimonial" "igul222 frequent buyer program" "igul222 secret promotion"

For what it's worth, "romano" means Roman in Spanish. As in, an inhabitant of the city of Rome, both in the classical and modern senses. The proper Spanish term would have been "rumano". I guess the guys over at the Italian capital are happy about the free compliments

"People called Romanes, they go, the house?"

For those who don't get the reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8

Also interesting is that the campaign chose "Romanians are smart", when they could have used much more positive phrases like "Romanians are friendly". Typically being "smart" is a stereotype already well-covered by too many other ethnicities (primarily Asians).

Obviously no "people" are smart or stupid or anything else. You can only generalize like this if you don't know many of them, and so such generalizations are always a mark of ignorance, never of true knowledge. This is not only true for human users, it seems also true for the current state of the net.

It should always be remembered that the internet doesn't encompass the entire world, far from it, it is still a playground for a very limited elite, with certain views and perceptions (just recall for example how many people around the world don't even have a bank account, they are many, but are seldom heard on the net). I've googled certain cultural terms from different societies, and at times couldn't find anything or could only find extremely limited information, because these themes were outside the scope of the usual demographics of internet users.

This of course is rapidly changing, with net use going the way of mobile phone use. And I guess a general adoption of the net will also mean English will lose its hegemonic place.

I'm going to ask the dumb question that the article doesn't explain: why do people hate Romanians so much? I've never found Romanians awful people. Is this just more ethnocentric rubbish and typical hostility toward Eastern European immigration?

As a Greek, no idea. If anything, I'm positively predisposed towards them.

In the UK at least, they get a bad press.thanks to the criminal element who find lucrative pickings in Britain.Go to a popular newspaper such as the Daily Mail, search and count the negative stories and you'll soon have your explanation.

Please don't go the Daily Mail for anything more than an idea of what small minded scared bigots we English sometimes can be.

UK and other western countries were sitting ducks in the face of the eastern european gipsy invasion and their supernatural ability to exploit the social protection programs and other benefits. And now all the romanians take the blame. I'll retract my stereotypes when you will show me one gipsy having a real job.

I can only speak to my own experience: I used to hang out in #linux on Undernet in the early 2000s. There were a lot of Romanian users on the network at the time, but basically every one of them that joined the channel was showing up to ask about something sketchy (how to hack a server, how to use a proxy, how to delete/disable logs...).

That is my impression as well. They are smart but distrust authority and consider laws "optional". If there is a new botnet or some horrible virus going around, chances are Romanians had something to do with it.

Romanians are a magnificent, proud nation. Disclaimer: I married one :)

To a large degree, the bad image comes from a small sub-populace that rejects the western life style, western values and produces a lot of what western laws see as criminality, all over Europe. So yes, typical ethnocentric rubbish.

Most Romanians themselves are deeply unhappy about this image. Despite the general air of oppression/depression in the country, Romanians are very nationalistic and hardworking, and care about their country's image abroad very much. (hence this campaign)

I realize this will likely get downvoted on PC basis, but your honest question deserved an honest answer.

I think part of the pride thing is that they get embarrassed if one of theirs is acting stupid. So that probably accounts for "Romanians are stupid" phrases in Romanian language.

> Romanians are very nationalistic ...

Interestingly I hang out with the immigrants and they are not very nationalistic. As most are trying to escape and forget about their old country. But my perception is strongly biased according to a particular (rather small) sample of the ones I met.

First of all, as dgquintas pointed out, los romanos son (Spanish) is wrong, as this means Romans are. The correct term is Rumanos.

Secondly, google autosuggest is not necessarily smart... try writing "I hate it when".

Finally, I think prejudices against romanian people are based on the fact that an important part of romanian inmigration into european countries is composed by gipsy romanians, which sadly tend to beg for money, steal or perform other crimes (not all of them, of course, it is a generalization based on what people see and perceive themselves). But of course, only a small portion of romanian people are romanian gipsies...

"The stereotype that (group) is (bad) is completely incorrect! You see, only (subgroup) is (bad)."

One thing I'll say about Romanians is that I noticed they distrust each other, or they are just not friendly towards each other. For example I've noticed how the immigrant community acts and while other communities opt to stay together, mingle and be friendly with each others, Romanians abroad don't give a hoot about other Romanians, they are willing to integrate into the local culture as fast as possible and forget about other Romanians.

As a Romanian myself, yes you are mostly right. But another thing to notice is that most of the Romanians that leave the country aren't well... the cream of the society so to speak :).

That's not an accurate view, brain drain is a real problem for Romania. While the phenomenon of Romanian manual labourers crowding Spain and Italy is well known, and oh so stereotyped by local media, there's a lot of emigration of highly trained (or soon to be highly trained) engineers and researchers to Western Europe and the US. But these people tend to be cosmopolitan and blend in extremely well, so they don't raise awareness of Romanians among foreigners.

And precisely this is the second focus of the campaign: raising awareness that there are a lot of emigrated high-achieving Romanians, quietly blending in.

While I agree that romanians integrate easily into the local culture (especially when the local culture is italian, french, belgian or spanish) I don't fully agree that romanians distrust each other completely :D. There are 3 classes of romanian immigrants that don't mix with each other: 1.The engineers, medical workers (doctors & assistants) and programmers: These are the silent romanians, one barely notices. 2.Construction workers and other low paid workers: These are the generic romanians and 3. The romanian gipsy group composed of organized beggars, pimps, prostitutes and thiefs = the bad romanians. When I hear someone talking romanian outside of romania, I try to classify him, and if he belongs to 3, I stay as far away as posible.

This is a very good observation.

This distrust was actively cultivated during communist times - if you would speak your thoughts to the wrong person, you would be made to disappear in the middle of the night by the secret police. The kink is that you didn't know who the "wrong person" was - brothers would snitch on brothers, sons on fathers, co-workers on each other. So you couldn't trust anybody.

This slowly changes with the generation change - younger generations didn't live through this paranoid system, so they don't understand the fear and the reservations - but the change will take another 20 - 40 years IMHO.

I'm Romanian. This seems like a harsh generalization, but I can see how it might look like that from the outside.

How about this alternative that's always been true for me and well.. probably everyone: people spend more time with like-minded people, be they foreigners or not. Why? I don't really need to answer that, right? :) So what does that mean? Well it means that you integrate easily into like-minded communities. If you're a foreigner then it's very probable that you're the odd one out and the community is composed of mostly natives.

I have lots of Romanian friends with whom I spend most of my time with, but I'm convinced that it's mostly due to the fact that we're like-minded. If I overhear a Romanian on the street do I instantly feel a need to talk to him? No, but I don't instinctively distance myself from him either.

edit: typing

Swedish people they are willing to integrate into the local culture as fast as possible and forget about other swedes, as well.

This campaign doesn't change the reason why peoples are searching for bad things about Romanians. It's just fixing a symptom but not the source of the problem.

Yes and no - I'll often note what Autocomplete prompts when I'm doing a search. Negative autocompletes may impact my perception of something when doing a related search (say, "Romanian holidays" and at "Romanian" autocomplete throws up some of the negative terms in the OP).

So it lessens the spread of those negative terms. As you point out, of course, it doesn't change the (far more important) source issue of people believing those stereotypes before going into Google.

It is interesting that none talk about this being spam, the "suggestion box spam". Would spamming the web with "romanians are smart" actually change something? Isn't this the actual non-working method that spammers use? Instead of building good "content", they just pretend to...

This is supposed to correct a perception problem. Of course Romanians are not perfect, but we're working on that :)

I had no idea Romanian looked so much like Latin, at least for that trivial "Romanii sunt" clause.

Romanian is a latinate/romantic language, like Italian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese... but for some reason it never gets listed with the others.

Relevant linguistic map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romance_20c_en.png

cause people have been exposed to spanish, portuguese, french and italian all their life and noticed the similarity, while few heard spoken romansh, romanian or ladino. Romania (and moldavia) were behind the iron courtain until yesterday.

Also, as an italian, while i find it possible to understand written romanian, it's much harder to understand it spoken, as the slavic pronounciation is very different.

On the other hand, Romanians often find it very easy to understand Italian, more so than most other latin languages. I know I do, I can watch Roberto Benigni films and mostly understand everything, without ever specifically learning italian (but Italian/English subtitles do help).

Another Romance language I found out about that exists unexpectedly in Eastern Europe is Aromanian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromanian_language Most other Romance languages are regional languages in a Major romance language dominated area (such as Occitan/French, Catalan/Spanish). This one, on the other hand, is a romance language surrounded by Slavic and Greek languages.

[Ukrainians a] gives a few negatives. But, weirdly,

[ukrainians are] autosuggests [iranians are] in the first few positions with ukrainians down the list.

I didn't submit feedback.

Typing "google is" brought up "google is evil", "google is watching you" and "google is racist" ... among "google is awesome" and "google Israel".

I was born in Moldova. When searching for "Moldovans are" I get...biggest drinkers. Maybe I should start a similar campaign...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com