The name seems pretty real to me. Could you please explain what about it would indicate it was fake?
Yes, using fancy methods to get a wrong result is still wrong. Let's also remember we are talking about a company that indexes the web. Perhaps they could use that data to test.
For all we know that might be a real name too, but all we can do is make an educated guess about whether or not it is. My point is that determining if a name is real or not is pretty arbitrary so if your objective is to verify if a name is valid or not, you simply can't be 100% accurate.
A wrong result is wrong, but making the best of what you have to try and get the right answer most of the time (while still being wrong sometimes) is in and of itself not wrong. Take any NP-hard problem, the best you can do is use heuristics to try and approximate a good solution, since the "right result" is simply impossible to compute.
Nope, I grew up around people with adjectives in their name. It is very, very common among the plain tribes[1]. I tend to be suspicious of people named "Smith" or "Johnson" since it seems like a common dodge on forms.
I am troubled that you think having an adjective in a family name should be cause to trouble someone. I realize European names have suffixes added in place of adjectives, but that should not blind people from other ways names are assembled. I am also particularly unhappy with an American company that has heuristics that flag a specific ethnic group in the USA.
"the best you can do is use heuristics to try and approximate a good solution, since the "right result" is simply impossible to compute."
Then don't friggin do it. Google is a SEARCH company and has indexed a huge amount of the web. Running names through their damn heuristics should have shown a problem. If you google "Yellow Horse" you see multiple examples of people with that family name on the first page of results.
Google especially shouldn't try it since they don't have support needed to handle the exceptions without people going to the press.
1) not sure about south or east or 1st Nations