I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way.
Google original mission statement was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Being a mirror of web content would only partially solve that mission, and that's assuming webmasters/producers are acting in good faith. Would it really be ideal for Google to be a "mirror" of link counts for "miserable failure" [0] and "Did the Holocaust Happen?" [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-holocaust-denial-site-go...
Ditto for "black girls": either your looking for porn or for stock photos. What other intentions do you have with such a query? (Besides making a point?)
Google changing results for Holocaust "denial" is likewise wrong. Someone searching for such things probably wants to find all such sites and not just a PC version of history repeating what they've already heard. Otherwise they wouldn't need to be searching in the first place. Same for someone searching "Is the moon real" or "is the earth flat".
In a great market, Google might start "cleaning" up their results to the point of annoying people, who would then switch. Unfortunately no one comes close to Google search, let alone overall lock-in. So we're stuck with whatever Google decides reflects their brand, including fixing up well-publicized queries for people that want to be offended and complain about stuff.
Edit: I search for "best basketball player" and all I see are black guys -- way over-represented. Why doesn't Google bump up Larry Bird to 4th place so there's some more diversity and fight the stereotype? Even worse, Yao Ming is nowhere to be found, what's that say?
I think you misread the Holocaust denial situation. The reason why "Did the Holocaust happen?" was so problematic was because that literal string of text is something that you'd never find on a mainstream site, such as the NYT or the Holocaust museum. And yet sites like StormFront would get bonus SERP for using that literal text in a page's title, url slug, and <h1>. StormFront benefited from a blind spot in Google's heuristics that had little to do with whether or not StormFront was actually a legitimate researcher into the question of the Holocaust's historical reality.
Same problem with Google Bombs. A law student with a blog was able to get enough people to link "waffle" to 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry [0]. Presumably, the average person googling "waffle" wants the food item, not info about Sen. Kerry. But the reality was that the metrics Google had long used to measure quality and credibility were all saying "waffle => Kerry".
Staying true to the algorithm assumes that the algorithm (and its inputs) were pure and complete to begin with. This is not necessarily the case.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_...
Yes, I did. But I don't want to see the parasitic SEO-driven copypasta linkfarms. Or perhaps have them, but including such flags.
Consider the possibility that the user is a black girl, or her parent. Generally, I'm careful not to assume I can anticipate the perspectives of everyone else.
The phrase "white boys" in general seems to be mostly desexualized. You can call someone a "white boy", either as a mild insult (like describing something as "vanilla") or a term of endearment. I think that's predicated from most people (in the U.S.) realizing that white boys/men are the status quo.
I'll ignore race and just say that I think the word "girls" in general has far more of a sexual/gendered connotation in U.S. usage. "Boy/Man" is considerably more generic and all-purpose. I use "Boy/Man/Guy" in casual conversation regardless of audience gender, e.g. e.g. "Boy, that was fucked up!" or "Man oh man that's got to hurt". I can't think of a single time in normal conversation where I would ever say "Girl" or "Lady" without referring to a female.
My question was whether there is any connection between being a white boy and Googling the search term "white boys".
It was prompted by the parent post suggesting that not seeing a connection between being a black girl and Googling "black girls" might be kind of a blind spot.
I think the implication was pretty clear that if you don't imagine someone Googling the search term "black girls", it's because they occupy the position of the "other" in your mind. However, I gave a reason to doubt it - contemplate whether and how often white boys Google "white boys".
I note that somehow, I already knew the connotations of the term "white boy" that you mentioned without Googling it. So you are not bringing anything to the point I was making.
I am not a laissez faire fanatic about much of anything, including Google search results - I just think that when people criticize such results, the search terms (and the subsequent reasoning) often seem contrived.
Same for "professor style" and expecting to get something other than that stereotypical brown sweater with elbow patches look.
If I don't want to see whatever results are useless or offensive, I'll do my own filtering.
But then, I grew up on searching the scientific literature using Science Citation Index. And other stuff in LexisNexis. You don't expect stuff to be missing because it isn't cited much, hasn't been replicated, or whatever. You can filter by how well stuff has been cited, of course.
What does that mean, to accurately depict what's "out there"? That could be as nonsensical and unproductive as completely killing the spam filter in your email. Do you feel that that GMail and other modern-spam-detecting solutions have given you an inaccurate view of the "real" mail you are getting?
By the late 2000s, content farms such as Demand Media were churning out clickbait that followed the best practices with SEO. Demand Media [0] consistently beat out the NYT on SERP, thanks in part to a store of 1 million domain names used to serve up ads and links for topics ("howtomakeasandwich.com" would like to junk articles about sandwiches). By 2010, DM had 105 million unique visitors a month [0] and reached a market cap of $2B. The NYT, by comparison, had about 32M unique monthly visitors [1] -- across all of its properties (BostonGlobe.com, etc), and its market cap in 2011 was about $1.5B [1].
Demand Media beat the living shit out of NYT and every other quality media site by playing to the the known heuristics of Google's SERP. Every other media company had the opportunity and resources to play spamlord. Apparently they didn't, and by 2011 no other media company was positioned to create content (of any quality) with the scalable efficiency of Demand Media.
Google could have just accepted that "might makes right", but that is not an objective/neutral decision, nevermind a rational one.
[0] http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/it-cost...
I did hate the Demand Media bullshit, however. But as I've said, I'd rather that Google flagged that stuff, and let me filter it out. I mean, maybe I'm researching an article about Demand Media. How could I do it if Google is suppressing it? Could Google perhaps have an "expert" option? Analogous to "family friendly" or whatever it's called.
And ideally, that's what it should be. Otherwise, how do researchers know what's really there, and what Google makes up? But in fact, Google is far from that ideal. Maybe it was initially unbiased. But successive waves of fighting SEO, and responding to social pressure, have taken their toll. Not to mention the increasing focus on what's happening right now, forgetting the past, and showing searchers what they likely want to find.