I was curious about this, so I decided to think about what Google's image search probably does and apply Occam's Razor...

It appears the image search is closely tied to the overall web search; the images returned are images from pages that match the search terms.

What would I expect a search for something like "white inventors" to return? Are there lots of websites cataloging inventors who are specially white, or discussing inventors specifically because they are white? Probably not, why would there be? But what about websites discussing non-white inventors, or talking about white vs non-white inventors? That seems much more likely to me since discussing and/or promoting a minority is more notable and common.

So it seems like the algorithm has decided to categorize "white inventor" and "black inventor" in very similar ways - both search terms are returning results relating to inventors of different races, whereby a non-white inventor is more interesting since it's the exception. I don't think it is surprising that these search results are as they are, and this seems much more likely to me than the whatever the alternative is that you are suggesting.

On a related topic, if you search for "black people" one of the image results is King Kong, and it comes from a website discussing comparing black people to monkeys. Another one of the images is (white) Mitch McConnell surrounded by other white people.

If you want an image search engine that is returning images whose content matches your search terms, there are tools that specifically focus on this.

For "white inventors:" Most likely if you include a race or ethnicity in your search, it is pulling from articles discussing race, so the results should be expected to be diverse.

For "American inventors:" probably it is keying to the second half of "African-American"

White American inventors are typically just referred to as "inventors," have you tried searching that?

>White American inventors are typically just referred to as "inventors," have you tried searching that?

when I search "inventors", 7/39 images are from articles specifically about overlooked black inventors. all searches relating to inventors are poisoned by american (i.e. foreign) culture war topics.

>probably it is keying to the second half of "African-American"

I refuse to believe that google can be so stupid as to do this after over two decades of development in natural language processing.

> I refuse to believe that google can be so stupid as to do this after over two decades of development in natural language processing.

I don't. They might have spent those decades speeding up and scaling their ability to be stupid. Stupidity at scale describes a pretty significant chunk of the internet.

Anyway, I don't think misinterpreting your intent on this type of search really costs them much, it seems like an edge case example to me.

It's well-known that Google search prioritizes newer content over older content, and history-related content created over the past few years tends to focus pretty overwhelmingly on race, gender, etc. So a sensible null hypothesis, is that Google's just showing you a representative sample of the new-ish content that's out there.

Could not that be a reflection of "the web is woke" rather than "Google is woke", though?

possibly, but it's a chicken and egg problem, isn't it? so much of what gets popular on the web is based on gaming SEO rankings.

Could entirely be explained by google's algorithms capturing a zeitgeist of sorts, and presently, discussions of "white inventors" and "american inventors" have a lot to say about black inventors and their presence or lack thereof in the historical record. No conspiracy necessary.

If you google Donald Trump you get a bunch of news results about his legal troubles. Not because Google has an axe to grind, but because Donald Trump has legal troubles, and it's in the news.

But if I search something in Google images I'd expect to see that term in images not the current trending cultural topic relating to that search term.

Doubtless the image search is using the same algorithms and pulling images from articles. Google doesn't know what you're "really" looking for. It just knows you searched for "white inventors," and the reason you're seeing black faces is that for pages with have high pagerank for the phrase "white inventors," there are images of black people.

Confirmed