Google and Walmart are RACIST – here’s proof!
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So my friend Andrew Commander wrote a blog post about how to “steal” a bike. In searching for funny images, he searched on “bike thief” and here’s what he got:
Notice what Google has suggested. Further, click on their suggestion and get this…
Worse, Google Suggest is filling your mind with unholy thoughts. Type in “nigg” and get this…
I might just be searching for the definition of niggardly– which means petty or reluctant to spend– a completely legitimate, non-racist search. But in the case of “bike thief”, Google is actively recruiting me to be a racist, even though it’s some algorithm that notices these particular terms go together. In the same way, if you look at Planet of the Apes on Walmart.com, it suggests Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”.
Perhaps that’s collaborative filtering gone wrong, where the system tells you what items go together based on what real people are doing– no moral judgment involved, just matching user activity streams.
This is even true with PPC, where advertiser load up a bunch of keywords (called dictionary uploading) and just plug people into search.
At conferences, my old fallback was to do a Google search on “used condoms” and “nuclear weapons”– and up pops an ebay ad– “Looking for Used Condoms? Bid on Used Condoms now! Find great deals & huge selection”
In the same way that Google’s algorithms will just match user data together, PPC advertisers will just upload every word in the dictionary and bid on it– never mind how silly it looks when you apply Dynamic KeyWord Insertion into ad copy. By the way, ebay has removed a lot of my favorite demonstration searches, but “used underwear” still works. And if you search on “used condoms”, you will still see ads from local.com and RefurbDepot.com– can’t imagine what they would have to offer. They should have “used” as a negative keyword, but that’s another post on PPC tactics.
So is it really wrong if the system gives you back what you’re most likely, statistically, to want to see? After all, you can’t blame the mirror if you don’t like what you see in the reflection.
Ian,
this is what happens when you make everything automatic. But I guess sometime near the future they will put some “filters” for this kind of things.
I’m sure not only with condoms and undies, for sure it does with many other ugly things too
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA. “Nigga stole my bike”
Man in my neighborhood it was all the white kids doing the bike stealing…
I was shocked when I read what google had suggested for me. I think there should be a position at Google to catch stuff like this when filters cannot.
-Andrew
you took it a step too far with that monkey picture man… racist mo fucka
Man, racism is everywhere, so I’m not surprised to see that. However, we both know that “nigga” came from black folks, so we really can’t hate on anyone for that one. The Walmart thing, though… well, I’ve always hated them anyway.
The whole point of the article is just to poke fun at what happens when robots reflect back actual human behavior. It’s not that Google is bad– it’s that they should put some filters in place to prevent the searches from returning what actually is most relevant or popular.
Did you know that in Google’s headquarters that they display real-time things people are searching on, but they have to filter porn? Sometimes they miss slang terms. Same issue with Google’s problem, as described in this post.
monkey picture is very nice I like it very much.
Yeah the ‘nigga stole my bike’ suggestion is pretty bad. At the same time, I think it is unreasonable to expect Google to police this kind of stuff. Once you filter out one offensive thing, people will want you to filter out a thousand other slightly offensive things. Google wants to make money from searchers regardless if they are racist or not. As for the Planet of Apes, I really doubt that was setup on purpose. E-commerce stores have automated upselling that shows movies that people bought together. Maybe black people just actually like The Planet of the Apes.
Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if some low level WalMart employee snuck in the Planet of the Apes thing. Interestingly I don’t see either of these issues on walmart of Google’s websites. So I guess this exposure forced them to clean things up.
That has been the remarkable part for the resonance call of the back part as such the we are.
Hummm……..Yeah…..
The bike thief trick doesn’t seem to work anymore as it would not yield a suggestion like your screenshot shows. I am guessing Google must of picked up on this and fixed it, lol.
Till then,
Jean
Yes I think those sites both cleaned them up since this post. I guess someone out there is monitoring their online public relations.
please stop letting dennis yu post on your mofuckin blog
I like the monkey picture..:-)
Hi,
I saw and read this article . i am very impressed and i wanna buy it can suggest me from where i can buy original software of it.
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