Jason Mark Roehrig My Web Home

There is certainly a gender bias programmed into the Google search engine. When I first stumbled upon the posting on Digg, I thought that this could be an unintentional consequence of the algorithm used, but further research has changed my first impression to the opinion stated in this articles headline.

I never, or very, very rarely read the comments on Digg, so I'm not sure what the opinion of others are. What I do know, is that if you google for "she invented" or "she discovered", you are served with a suggestion "Did you mean..."He..."", while the male gender search doesn't come up with any suggestions.

The search for "she invented" comes up with 139,000 results, while the search for "he invented" comes up with 1,060,000 results. Hence my first assumption was, that the suggestion was due to a substantial difference in possible results. Some more numbers:

Total Results for "X invented"

1,199,000

Percentage of "she invented" from Total Results

%11.6

Percentage of "he invented" from Total Results

%88.4

But a search for "she discovered" offers a total of 1,150,000 results, and for "he discovered" shows a total of 1,390,000 results. In total results the male version is still in the lead, though no longer is there a substantial difference, which could justify the seeming bias. Once again, some more numbers on this result:

Total Results for "X discovered"

2,540,000

Percentage of "she discovered" from Total Results

%45.3

Percentage of "he discovered" from Total Results

%54.7

So I entered the next obvious, well to me at least, search query for both genders. Now "she gave birth" offers a total of 803,000, which seems rather low if you think of the substantial contribution by women offered during the birth of alone over 6 billion people currently occupying this planet. Now the male result is subtiantly lower, the search for "he gave birth" only offering a total of 23,700.

Total Results for "X gave birth"

826,700

Percentage of "she gave birth" from Total Results

%97.0

Percentage of "he gave birth" from Total Results

%3.0

What is somehow disturbing, is that the last query did not offer a "Did you mean..." suggestion for the male gender search, although this search offered the clearest gender difference in total search result.

Cropped images of a few screen shots I took.

This was by no means an extensive research project, but shows sufficiently an inherint gender bias within the search results offered by Google, which Yahoo doesn't display.

At least when it comes to the search term failure, which lists what or who as number one result?

For more information read the article on Search Engine Watch titled George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google.