Are Search Engines Blackwashing Their Search Results?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563574

by affiliator • 10 years ago

10 9 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

google "portraits of European people":

https://www.google.com/search?q=portraits+of+European+people&source=lnms&tbm=isch

Here are my results:

http://i.imgur.com/6s9qK9g.jpg

Similar results with bing, duckduckgo.

No so with Yandex:

http://i.imgur.com/zvbwMuF.jpg

An Alt-Right vlogger has done a video on the phenomenon. The same thing happens with the search term "European People Art"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b14IgSPkPC4

csydas4• 10 years ago

No, they're not, and if you look at what pictures are actually being link you can start to understand it a bit more.

What the first result is returning is keyworded based on art discussions about European works. Relevant articles discussing the uniqueness of portraits of black people in rennaissance paintings are the results you're seeing. Likely it's the inclusion of "people" which is throwing the results, as you see a much "whiter" result set if you search "portraits of european" (plural or not doesn't matter). In fact, for the original search if you scroll down you begin to see the paintings and portraits you are expecting to see.

Basically, it's just keywording providing results you weren't expecting. The word that throws it is "people".

Edit: and in regards to why Yandex isn't showing it, it's because the top hits are from a russian artist's site, so they're just weighting russian sites higher. For whatever reason, people clicked to these images when they searched it on Yandex.

This is a non-story.

affiliator3• 10 years ago

There is a difference in the results for "portraits of European" and "portraits of Europeans".

"portraits of Europeans" contains a large number of non-European faces.

csydas4• 10 years ago

"portraits of Europeans" contains a large number of non-European faces.

Which are the same that are showing up via the articles about art of european history from the original result. Again, this is just keywording working against your expectations. The relevant results for these keywords lead to articles discussing the presence of non-whites in European artwork.

What you envision for the results of the search terms are apparently different than how other people envision them. In this case, the search is considering portrait paintings, not portrait photos or anything, and from there, it looks like the most popular results are these articles.

Search for "[pictures, photos] of european people" or just "european people" and you get more pictures of white europeans. Unsuprisingly, once you search "paintings of european people" you start to get the aforementioned paintings once more.

This isn't a conspiracy or social manipulation, it's just that there is apparently enough discussion and interest in older european paintings including black people that searches related to paintings of europeans returns a few results with black people or indian people.

charlesism• 10 years ago

There might be a story here; a story about a company that tinkered too much with their search algorithm. I don't know what they've been changing over there, but their search seems to get worse and worse every year. If the application of AI to my search results means any unusual words are weighted out of the equation, I'd rather just have the "dumb" results.

brudgers• 10 years ago

This might make an interesting blog post, particularly if supporting data was exposed. Applying the Russell-Norvig definition of an artificial intelligence as an actor capable of action in the world based upon its perceptions, then what we may have is the manifestation of narrow perception.

Are Search Engines Blackwashing Their Search Results?

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