What's 'she' doing in Google search?
Google's search engine includes a spell-checker, and it may be getting the company into some hot water.
A search for the phrase "she invented" prompts this question from the search engine: "Did you mean 'he invented?'"
That query was picked up by bloggers, several of whom noted that similar "corrections" pop up with phrases like "she discovered," "she conquered," and "she saved." Searches for the male versions of those phrases did not prompt any corrections from the company.
It's likely that people at Google may have some explaining to do this weekend at their Mother's Day brunches.
Blog community response:
"The same, by the way, also applies for Google searches for 'she created,' 'she succeeded,' and 'she led.' Lest you think that this happens for all active verbs, Google does not make the same suggestion for 'she followed' or 'she failed.'"
--Balkinization
"From what we know Google's spell-checker at its core works on phrases which are popular on the web, as opposed to manual edits."
--Google Blogoscoped
"Why Google renders so? This case is not same in Yahoo, for this search term, Yahoo is providing proper results. What happened to our GOOGLE ? Lets Google it."
--B-Factor
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change from moment to moment:
"she killed" brings up "Did you mean 'he killed'" AND vice versa.
"she murdered" brings up the he remark but NOT vice-versa.
That's prejudicial of men.
Most notably "she raped" does NOT bring up the he remark nor
does he bring up she.
On a more positive note:
"she loved" does NOT bring up he and "he loved" does NOT
bring up she.
"she gave" does NOT bring up he and "he gave" does NOT bring
up the she.
All in all, it seems a mixed bag of results. Feminist conspiracy
theorists need to calm down. These quirky results are probably
artifacts of something obscure rather than evidence of the ever-
evil sex (men) trying to put women down.
At first I thought Google had some sort of threshold, like if there were fewer than 1 million results, it would suggest a similar search query that resulted in more than 1 million results. But "she invented" returns over 2 million results as of this posting.
"She discovered" returns over 16 million results and Google still suggests "he discovered." With quotes surrounding the phrase it still returns over 1 million results.
Shame on Google.