Black Google?

 Posted by on 26 August 2008 at 12:28 pm  Business, Technology
Aug 262008
 

Is there a need for a “Black Google”? According to this article, there is.

In a free market, specialty search engines could be entirely reasonable and appropriate if there is a demand for such a service. For instance, a search engine catering towards physicians might properly give different sorts of results than a search engine catering towards patients.

But the business model would only succeed if there were a subpopulation that had distinctive and significantly different search engine results preferences from the population at large, and the business could get them to become dominant users of their alternative search engine.

Otherwise you end up with problems like this:

Since search engines learn from what people are clicking on, RushmoreDrive had a small problem immediately after its launch: So many white members of the media were visiting the site that the results became skewed and turned up more “white” results…

The article also struck an odd note when it stated that Google’s search results “alienate the rest of the population” (i.e., the non-caucasians). It’s not clear to me that the term “alienate” is warranted.

   
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