DummySpots.com

As pointed out in this post on Google Blogoscoped, some folks think they found a built-in “bias” in Google due to the fact that its algorithm, when queried with phrases such as “African ingenuity,” “African Pie,” “African Idol,” etc would return spell-checking suggestions such as Did you mean:American Ingenuity.

That was, of course, not bias, it was mathematical accuracy. Within the context of the phrase, the word “American” appears thousands of times more often than any other word spelled “A??rican.”

Accuracy notwithstanding, Google almost immediately has responded to the PC pressure, and has modified its results so this particular situation doesn’t occur.

Google has opened quite a can of worms by selectively killing their algorithm’s accuracy in order to cater to the shrill voices of those who would tear their fingernails off digging this deep to find something to be “offended” by.

As I noted in the comments to that post, at this time, if you search for “South America Johannesburg,” Google suggests “Did you mean: South Africa Johannesburg.” If Google wishes to maintain any sort of consistency, they should also remove this suggestion, as by their own actions of accepting the prior example as “biased,” they have defined this result as “biased” as well. And as you can see, people could find all kinds of “examples” of such “bias” if they were inclined to waste that much time, and each such “example” would actually just be proof that Google is great at returning the most accurate results.

“South America Johannesburg” does return results (31 vs. over half a million for the same phrase with “Africa,” but the numbers don’t matter, right?), and all three words are spelled correctly. It’s just in the context of the phrase that the word “America” obviously is not the expected or common term. But, hey, who are Google to decide what the searcher is looking for? Maybe someone wants to know if there’s a city named Johannesburg in South America.

So, Google suggestions (and who knows, maybe search results, too) are being made selectively less accurate. Certainly not a big red fundamental flag to do anything with the stock immediately, but a small window of insight into the fact that the people behind Google are subject to being blown about by the winds (or maybe even the breezes) of Political Correctness.