Thread by @thenewsmovement

EXCLUSIVE: Google tells TNM they are tackling bias in search.

That’s when a search engine favours some results over others.

So what’s the problem - and the solution? 🤔

More in our exclusive interview with Vice President of Search @Google, Pandu Nayak...

A thread...🧵

1/ “15% of the searches we get every single day are one’s we’ve never seen before”

Here’s the challenge. The web has “hundreds of billions or trillions of pages”.

There’s no way humans can process and rank all the results fast enough.

So Google uses algorithms…

2/ “One of the biggest myths that there is on search is that it is heavily personalised”

Challenge no.2: the web is changing all the time as new content is published.

And that can affect how search results are ranked, and what information is fed to you…

3/ “Bias can show up in many, many different ways. So it’s not like there’s a silver bullet answer”

This ranges from gender bias to identifying explicit content.

Google told us they’ve been working on techniques to address various types of search bias.

An example…

4/ “It’s not like these algorithms are making any value judgments here”

Google told us that the way search engines understand language is different to how people do it.

The algorithms look for pages on the web that contain particular words, and can reflect “societal biases”...

5/ “Our goal here is to make sure that we don’t reinforce these types of biases”

Listen to @Emma_Mid's exclusive interview with #Google on YouTube 👇

6/ @Emma_Mid has been investigating why our search results appear 'biased'. In particular, why #algorithms largely feed us white men.

In an exclusive interview, she asked #Google what they're doing about it...

Read the full story here 👉
thenewsmovement.com/articles/TNM-0…