The moral bias behind your search results

So whenever I visit a school
and talk to students,

I always ask them the same thing:

Why do you google?

Why is Google the search engine
of choice for you?

Strangely enough, I always get
the same three answers.

One, "Because it works",

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

Two, somebody will say,

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

It's not an equally great answer

and my reply to that is usually,
"Try to google the word 'search engine',

you may find a couple
of interesting alternatives."

And last but not least, thirdly,

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.

Now, as a man of the humanities,

albeit, the digital humanities man,

that just makes my skin curl,

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
on a basic principle

behind the 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 is the capital of France?

What are the building blocks
of a water molecule?"

Great -- google away.

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

to proving that it's actually London
or H30,

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

We agree, on a global scale,
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,

you're looking for knowledge,

which is something way more
complicated and delicate.

And to get to knowledge,

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

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

But because of who I am,

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

I will value them differently.

And I will value them differently
and I will say,

"Yes, this is true, but this is more
important to me than that."

And this is where it becomes interesting
because this is where we become human.

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 --

that's food for thought.

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

We'll start with "Michelle Obama",
the First Lady of the United States.

And we'll click for pictures,
it works really well, as you can see.

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

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

How does this work?

Quite simple,

Google uses a lot of smartness
to achieve this,

but quite simply, they look at two things
more than anything.

First, what does 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 "Michelle Obama.jpeg"?

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

So you 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
across the Internet

where her face was distorted
to look like a monkey.

And that picture was published all over.

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 "Michelle Obama.jpeg" or the like.

You get why, to manipulate
the search result.

And it worked, too.

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

that distorted money picture
showed up among the first results.

Now, the results are self-cleansing,

and that's sort of the beauty of it

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",

which they did,

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

But then, a couple years go by,

and the world's most googled Anders,

Anders Behring Breivik,

did what he did.

This is July 22 in 2011
and a terrible day in recent history.

This man, a terrorist, blew up
a couple of government buildings,

walking distance from where we are
right now in Oslo, Norway

and then he traveled to the the