Demographically based search engines are inevitable and useful

I normally agree with Mathew Ingram, but today’s post on “RushmoreDrive = Dumb idea” completely misses the point. RushmoreDrive is self-described as:

“RushmoreDrive is a first-of-its-kind search engine for the Black community. We deliver a blend of mainstream search results plus a layer of more relevant search results influenced by the Black community. RushmoreDrive is where the Black community goes to find the best search results.”

Mathew rejects this outright as “racially segregated” and possibly racist. He then goes on to ridicule this with the example of a hypothetical British search engine:

“… so that British people can find results for soccer when they search for the term “football,” instead of getting a bunch of NFL links, or so they can get results about French fries when they use the term “chips” instead of links to information about Ruffles or Pringles?”

I actually think that would make a lot of sense, just as RushmoreDrive makes sense. It isn’t a matter of racism, or nationalism in the case of a British search engine. Search engines, like all advertising based websites, are products that serve their readership and their advertisers, just as the newspaper that Mathew works for does. A quick check of the home page for Toronto based Globe and Mail shows that it does indeed favor stories of interest to Canadians, and writes all of its copy with a Canadian readership in mind.

The idea that there is a natural and unbiased search result that we should be shown is cultural imperialism, and may actually be more racist and nationalist than Mathew is ready to admit. Search engines are based on relevance algorithms resulting from linkage patterns, and use reinforcement from the user’s click patterns. If the majority of a search engine’s traffic is white and based in the US, then there will obviously be bias towards that traffic. We should have search engines that deliberately adopt a different bias on their link tracking, and try to gather a different demographic user base to help direct their results. The users will benefit, and so will the advertisers.