Politics of Search Engines: Safiya Umoja Noble

Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor from the UCLA Department of Information Studies, spoke last week about her research into how Google and other digital technologies disseminate information in “Algorithms of Oppression: Field Notes from Critical Information Studies (and What Can We Learn from Digital #Fails).” In her Jan Term Speaker Series talk, Noble criticized search engines like Google which often link search results to racist and sexist misrepresentations. She encouraged the audience to think critically about Google, search engines, and technological advances.

Noble focuses her research on where information studies intersects with gender and ethnic studies. From the start of her lecture, she talked about Google as an oppressive societal force. While Noble spent much of her time criticizing how Google disseminates information, she also spoke about the gentrifying effects of the company’s presence here in the Bay Area.

Noble discussed Google’s private fleet of buses that transport people living in San Francisco to the company’s Mountain View headquarters. She referred to research conducted by city planner Alexandra Goldman, who links the fleet of buses to rent hikes in San Francisco. According to Goldman, “rental prices within a walkable distance of these shuttles stops are rising faster (up to 20 percent) than the rental prices outside the walkable distance.”

Most of Noble’s research links Google search results to racist and sexist misrepresentations. She showed how simple Google searches like, “black girls,” “Latina girls,” and “Asian girls,” are littered with results that hypersexualize each demographic group. She presented screenshots of searches she conducted, revealing pornographic links contained on the first page of the results. The first page, she mentioned, is often the only page anyone ever sees. Noble referred to the first page of results for any given Google search as the “cultural reality.”

To young women of color, these search results can be confusing, Noble said. Despite how these Google results lack racial sensitivity, people continue to view Google as an objective tool, Noble said. She referred to Pew Research that suggests that 23 percent of the United States population believes that what Google says reflects reality.

She said she hopes that the future will bring us a new search engine that disseminates better information. In closing, Noble listed three guidelines when thinking about Google, search engines, and technological advance in general: Reject notions of neutrality, embrace a critical perspective on information and technology, and pay attention to commercially biased information.

She also recommended four ways to stay in action: Resist “black-boxed” tech, eliminate tech-overdevelopment, make research visible to the public, and champion credible information for democracy.

Interested in Noble’s research? Check out her website at https://safiyaunoble.com.