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0 pointsbartread5y ago0 comments

You may be right. It's been bugging me since I posted earlier on so I fired up a VPN with an endpoint in Japan, along with a private browsing session in Firefox, to see if I got different results. As it happens the results were interesting:

- If I entered "person" I'd see a mix of images substantially similar to what I saw using google.co.uk up to and including Terry Crews, which was frankly a little weird, and otherwise mostly white

- If I entered "人", which Google Translate reliably informs me is Japanese for "person", I'd see a few white faces, but a substantial majority of Japanese people

So it seems possible that Google's trying to be smart in showing me images that reflect the ethnic makeup I might expect based on my language and location. I mean, it's doing a pretty imperfect job of it (men are overrepresented, for one) but viewed charitably it's possible that's what's going on.

Is the case for woke outrage against Google Image Search overstated? Possibly; possibly not. After these experiments I honestly don't feel like I have enough data to come to a conclusion either way, although it does seem like they may at least be trying to do a half decent job.

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cowmoo7285y ago

This seems like you're attributing motive to google here, but I don't believe that's right. For example, Terry Crews appears in the query "person" because his "TIME Person of the Year 2017 Interview" article was very popular online. I get a lot of Greta Thunberg because she was TIME Person of the Year 2019 and received similar online attention because of Donald Trump.

The TL;DR of it is that google crawls the internet for photos, associates those photos with text content pulled from the caption or from the surrounding page, and gives them a popularity score based on the popularity of the page/image. There are some cleverer bits trying to label objects in the images, but it's primarily a reflection of how frequently that image is accessed and how well the text content on the page matches your query. There's some additional localization, anti-spam, and freshness rating that influences the results too.

The majority of pages with "人" and a photo on it that has a machine labeled person image would be a photo of a japanese/chinese person, and if you're being localized to japan with a vpn, that would be even more true.

Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.

bartreadOP5y ago

> Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.

I'm not disputing that, and it certainly explains why it's "good enough" for somes search queries whilst being totally gimpy for others.

My understanding was that Google does prioritise what it's classified as local search results though, on the basis that they're likely to be more relevant.

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