By Karl Quinn
In news that should give everyone who uses the world's biggest search engine pause for thought, Google has been forced to change an algorithm that suggested racist and sexist questions via its autocomplete function, and directed users towards ideologically skewed results.
While there's a lot to like about the company's swift response, the issues at stake here are significant and not readily addressed by the quick-fix patch it has offered. And for those of us who have come to believe that Dr Google is a values-free neutral dispenser of information, the lesson is clear. You shouldn't, at least not entirely.
The issue was exposed by UK journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who last week asked Google to explain why search queries such as "are Jews…" and "are women…" were being automatically completed with some rather problematic suggestions.
"It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: 'are Jews a race?', 'are Jews white?', 'are Jews Christians?', and finally, 'are Jews evil?'," Cadwalladr wrote.
The comany logo on the doors of Google's UK headquarters.Credit: Chris Ratcliffe
Clicking through to the last of these, she wrote, produced a page of results largely in the affirmative.
Similarly, the top automatically generated result when the words "are women…" were typed was "are women evil?", while the top result for "are Muslims…" was "are Muslims bad?"
Cadwalladr hypothesised, and quoted people who believed, that this was evidence the search engine was being "gamed" by activists pushing an extreme right-wing agenda, using bots and flooding the web with links that conspire to elevate right-wing searches in Google's predicted queries, and right-wing sites in its results.
Google claims Cadwalladr made contact last Friday, but by the time her story appeared in The Observer on Sunday, the suggested questions she listed were no longer being automatically generated.
Google autocomplete search results for 'why women...' as of December 8, 2016.Credit: screen capture
Now, some queries along those lines – such as "Christians are…" and "homosexuals are…" – no longer generate autocomplete questions at all.
However, others still generate conservatively weighted results. The words "homosexuality is…", for instance, produce suggestions including "homosexuality is a sin", "homosexuality is wrong" and "homosexuality is a choice".
The search term 'all jews...' no longer produces any autocomplete suggestions.
It should be noted that the negative suggestions run both ways. These, for instance, are the top four autocomplete suggestions for "conservatives are...": conservatives are evil"; "conservatives are less intelligent"; "conservatives are smarter"; and "conservatives are stupid".
However, those queries produce pages of results that argue both for and against those propositions, suggesting the questions and results are more likely to have been generated organically by the algorithm.
But the search term 'are jews...' still does.
In response to queries from Fairfax Media about what had happened, a spokesman for Google Australia advised: "We took action within hours of being notified on Friday of the autocomplete results."
Google has offered autocomplete suggestions to search queries since 2008. It is possible to turn them off (see below), but by default the autocomplete search prediction is set to on.
Typing 'all muslims...' produces a rather worrying result.
"Autocomplete predictions are algorithmically generated based on users' search activity and interests," the Google Australia spokesman said.
"Users search for such a wide range of material on the web – 15 per cent of searches we see every day are new.
While Google appears not to have applied its scrutiny to 'homosexuality is...'.
"Because of this, terms that appear in autocomplete may be unexpected or unpleasant. We do our best to prevent offensive terms, like porn and hate speech, from appearing, but we acknowledge that autocomplete isn't an exact science and we're always working to improve our algorithms."
The spokesman declined to offer any detail on what changes to these particular algorithms were made, and how, other than to say: "After review, we found this was in violation of our policies."
But Cadwalladr's article, and Google's response to it, points to some fundamental concerns about the way supposedly value-neutral search engines might be manipulated to produce ideologically skewed results.
It also points to an ethical minefield for the search giant: ought it to be policing this area, effectively stepping into the realm of censorship – and can it afford not to?
Further complicating that is the multitude of possible search terms that would need to be screened if Google were to decide to take a more hands-on approach.
For example, the query "all Jews..." no longer produces any automatic suggestion, but the query "are Jews..." was still turning up "are jews evil..." as a top result on Thursday afternoon.
While there may not be a simple solution to all this, there is a simple lesson. Be sceptical, and don't simply take the results – especially the first page of results – generated by Google, or any other search engine, as gospel.
Then again, the people who habitually type in phrases such as "all Jews are …" probably aren't really looking to have their minds opened.
How to turn off the autocomplete search function (from Google's support page)
If you don't want predictions from your search engine to appear in the address bar, you can turn them off.
On your computer, open Chrome.
At the top-right, click More > Settings.
At the bottom, click Show advanced settings.
In the "Privacy" section, untick the box next to "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar".
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin