Diary of a Mad Editor

I was reading an interesting post over at the blog, Consistently Inconsistent this morning. According to the post, there’s a new search engine out there geared specifically towards the African-American community. Apparently, there is a need for it because, according to the search engine’s founder, John C. Taylor, Google’s search algorithm is biased against black web-surfers:

“I was having great difficulty finding things that matter to us,” Taylor said. “You’d like to think things like cancer are race neutral, but cancer is black or white. How we get it, the things that impact how black people deal with the treatment regimen – all that is different. I looked for it, but there is really nothing that spoke to how black men deal with [it]. So I said, ‘Gosh, it would be great if we could merge all the stuff from the National Cancer Society, the National Institute of Health, all the right places, the authorities, but also get that information that is specifically relevant to black people . . . .”

That’s an interesting theory — especially if you’re trying to sell African-Americans on using your search engine. But, is it true? I went to Rushmore Drive and input the search terms “cancer african-americans.” In another window, I input the exact same terms into Google. Guess what? The results returned were more or less the same — certainly not so different as to support the argument that Google’s algorithm is biased against black people. I input several other search terms that might be relevant to the black community and I got similar results. In fact, the only thing my own research was able to conclude is that Mr. Taylor doesn’t know how to use a search engine.