INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

Newsweek reported a search engine called “Rushmoredrive” which is trying to cope with the sociopolitical bias of Google. While Google relies on the behavior of majority, Rushmoredrive is “tailors its results to the proclivities” of the African-American community.

Rushmoredrive relies on a technique callled “geo-biasing.” With data about concentration of African-Americans in various ZIP codes, and the IP address of the request, the website is able to present different result for requests from different regions. For instance, a search request for “Whitney” that comes from Atlanta, a region with a large black population, would result in “Whitney Houston” and “Whitney M. Young”. A search request for the same word that comes from a largely white residential area would result in “Whitney Museum”.

Even though the Newsweek article exalted this idea, in my opinion however, it introduces another bias: what about white man living in black regions? Are they less worthy of a “tailored result” than the white man in white regions?

Another problem is a common flaw with “personalized” or “tailored” search results: user want to see stable and consistent search results from search engines. Mainstream search engine achieve this by making the first few results constant and only “personalize” for lower ranked results. But this search engine seems to overlook this wisdom and over-tailored its results.

Newsweek story: http://www.newsweek.com/id/136339