Responding to Stuff.co.nz story about sexism against women titled “Shocking sexism in Google search” I have written about the way Google autocomplete discriminate against Maori.
It is unfortunate that no effort has, nor has ever been made to discuss the racist and offensive auto complete relating to Māori or any other Indigenous Peoples of the world.
I first raised this issue in May 2010. Today the issue is not as bad due mainly to of the mass introduction of authentic Maori information by Maori, Iwi, knowledge workers and academia.
What is the Google autocomplete? Google states, “As you type, auto complete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of auto complete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google”.
How does the Google Autocomplete work. According to Google “ Autocomplete predictions are algorithmically determined based on a number of factors (including popularity of search terms) without any human intervention. Just like the web, the search queries presented may include silly or strange or surprising terms and phrases. While we always strive to reflect the diversity of content on the web (some good, some objectionable), we also apply a narrow set of removal policies for pornography, violence, hate speech, and terms that are frequently used to find content that infringes copyrights.”
Microsoft Bing www.bing.co.nz does not offer the same offensive and racist auto complete options nor does its image search and also does not produce the same offensive images as Google does when performing searches for say fat maori.
If you try the following searches in Google (similar to those in the international article referenced above), you will see there is still an element of racism and offensive searches being performed, while other search auto complete is totally bizzare e.g., when searching Maori men or Maori women.
- Maori are
- māori are
- maori are not
- why are maori
- maori men are
- maori women are
- Maori people are
Leave a Reply