I’ve just been alerted to a post on Tricia Wang’s eponymous blog called Search Algorithms as Revealing of Social Stereotypes.

From the post:

I performed the original google image search just on “Asian women,” “American women,” and “Asian American women” for a presentation on stereotypes and identities of Asian American Youth. I want to demonstrate the pervasive stereotypes of Asian women – just how hyper-hyper sexualized they are. And it’s interesting to show that when you Google image search – there is no hierarchies of approval that the images have to go through like for traditional media (newspapers, TV shows and etc, where images usually become racialized in the approval process. SO for Google searches – it’s just based on algorithms on what users are clicking through and page ranking based on how many sites point to the webpage - which all determines the relevancy of the answers to the search query.

Via She’s Such a Geek!.