New Delhi: Search giant Google is thronged with millions of questions everyday that range from ‘the best place to travel’ to ‘how to properly cut a mango’. No doubt, Google has emerged as a boon for those who depend upon it for crucial information, something that technology has made available on people’s fingertips.
But then, what if this popular source for information that has made many dependent on it got things wrong?
In one example that throws open the debate on the accountability that the search giant must extend to its users instead of the usual defence of being an algorithm, one search result has annoyed millions of people, particularly the transgenders across the world.
Their anger stems from results thrown up upon a search for the number of genders. A Google search for “How many genders are there” shows: "There are only 2 genders. Male and Female" as the top result.
Reddit, a social news networking service, broke the news saying ‘Google is about to trigger so many people’ where people reacted saying, “Only going to trigger like 3 people. The problem is that those 3 people have nothing better to do than to be as loud about it as possible making it seem like they are in fact a majority. After that everyone else just acts triggered in order to appear tolerant.”
Some said, “People can be less masculine and less feminine than their sex, but that doesn't place them in a different gender.”
This result is due to the effect of a Google search feature called ‘Featured Snippets’. The feature aggregates information from high-ranking sources on the results page and tries to give a summary of the answer the user is looking for.
In the case of gender question, Google picked a few words from the Wikipedia article on gender to give a general response. But the real problem here seems that Google is shaping how we see the world around us and giving results accordingly.
To match the gender diversity, many tech companies already allow users numerous options to pick a gender. Social media giant Facebook, lets you pick one of 53 choices of gender or add a customised one.
Still, this is not the first time that search results have been a problem. Last year, a Google Image search result for two black men was "gang," and for the same photo with a black and white man was "art". Understandably, this heated up the issue of racial discrimination.
