Name: 【TED】Andreas Ekström: The moral bias behind your search results (The moral bias behind your search results | Andreas Ekström)
Uploaded: 2017-01-08T14:58:55.000Z
Duration: 9 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So whenever I visit a school and talk to students,

Adverbs of frequency

Why is Google the search engine of choice for you?

Strangely enough, I always get the same three answers.

which is a great answer; that's why I Google, too.

"I really don't know of any alternatives."

It's not an equally great answer and my reply to that is usually,

you may find a couple of interesting alternatives."

inevitably, one student will raise her or his hand and say,

"With Google, I'm certain to always get the best, unbiased search result."

Certain to always get the best, unbiased search result.

even if I, too, realize that that trust, that idea of the unbiased search result

is a cornerstone in our collective love for and appreciation of Google.

I will show you why that, philosophically, is almost an impossibility.

But let me first elaborate, just a little bit, on a basic principle

behind each search query that we sometimes seem to forget.

So whenever you set out to Google something,

start by asking yourself this: "Am I looking for an isolated fact?"

What are the building blocks of a water molecule?

There's not a group of scientists who are this close to proving

You don't see a big conspiracy among those things.

what the answers are to these isolated facts.

But if you complicate your question just a little bit and ask something like,

"Why is there an Israeli-Palestine conflict?"

You're not exactly looking for a singular fact anymore,

which is something way more complicated and delicate.

you have to bring 10 or 20 or 100 facts to the table

and acknowledge them and say, "Yes, these are all true."

young or old, black or white, gay or straight,

but this is more important to me than that."

And this is where it becomes interesting,

This is when we start to argue, to form society.

And to really get somewhere, we need to filter all our facts here,

through friends and neighbors and parents and children

and coworkers and newspapers and magazines,

to finally be grounded in real knowledge,

which is something that a search engine is a poor help to achieve.

So, I promised you an example just to show you why it's so hard

to get to the point of true, clean, objective knowledge --

I will conduct a couple of simple queries, search queries.

It's a perfect search result, more or less.

It's just her in the picture, not even the President.

Google uses a lot of smartness to achieve this, but quite simply,

they look at two things more than anything.

First, what does it say in the caption under the picture on each website?

Does it say "Michelle Obama" under the picture?

Pretty good indication it's actually her on there.

Second, Google looks at the picture file,

the name of the file as such uploaded to the website.

Again, is it called "MichelleObama.jpeg"?

Pretty good indication it's not Clint Eastwood in the picture.

So, you've got those two and you get a search result like this -- almost.

Now, in 2009, Michelle Obama was the victim of a racist campaign,

where people set out to insult her through her search results.

There was a picture distributed widely over the Internet

where her face was distorted to look like a monkey.

And people published it very, very purposefully,

to get it up there in the search results.

They made sure to write "Michelle Obama" in the caption

and they made sure to upload the picture as "MichelleObama.jpeg," or the like.

You get why -- to manipulate the search result.

So when you picture-Googled for "Michelle Obama" in 2009,

that distorted monkey picture showed up among the first results.

because Google measures relevance every hour, every day.

However, Google didn't settle for that this time,

they just thought, "That's racist and it's a bad search result

and we're going to go back and clean that up manually.

We are going to write some code and fix it,"

And I don't think anyone in this room thinks that was a bad idea.