Pagerank’s discrimination
PageRank (PR) is a mathematical formula that judges the “value of a page” by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. Its purpose is to determine the relative importance of a given webpage in a network (i.e., the World Wide Web). As we read in chapter 14, specifically how Google does this is by assessing the frequency that a website is linked on other webpages. The higher the frequency that a page is ranked to other pages, that means that the collective endorsement of that page gives it a higher “authority score” compared to other pages, and the pages that link to that page with a high authority score will increase their hub scores. But after doing a some more research, I discovered that it was not just the system that is giving out authority scores to web pages, but also Google’s “army of human raters”. These human raters rate the quality of search results to make sure that the top pages deliver expertise and trustworthiness. Essentially that means that these human raters also have a say in what kind of information they want to be more accessible to the public.
The article that I found talked about Google’s search algorithm and the discrimination that tends to be evident. Even though Google claims that they are neutral when it comes to pagerank, they continue to be extremely vague when asked about the ramifications of its cherrypicking and deciding what’s bad information or wrong information. The problem with these human raters that I mentioned above is that they are predominantly white and asian males, that is why they have a much harder time spotting subtle problems that underrepresented groups, including people of color and women, find disturbing. Some of the examples is that if you search women or girl on google, the overwhelming majority of the results on google image are photos of white women (>95%). UCLA professor Safiya Noble has researched a lot on this issue and she claims that these “racist results” are users’ faults since they simply reflect our own cultural assumptions and previous search histories. Google’s pagerank also skew their results as to prioritize advertisers and rich white audiences that Google wants to attract. Google has a long way to go when it comes to making sure that their pagerank algorithms are free of biases and discriminatory mechanisms.
Sources:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-pagerank/