Dear readers what will be your reaction if you will try to find out some search related work on your favorite search engine Google and it will give you weird answer. Same thing happened recently when someone searched for ‘Bitches near me’ and it shows you names and addresses of Girls’ PGs, hostels.
If there’s a question you don’t know the answer to, more often than not, you’ll turn to Google. The search engine’s monopoly over the market, and data pool at hand, are almost unparalleled in public perception-which makes it all the more alarming when it tends to feed into dangerous and misogynistic values.
This is what seems to have happened, as pointed out by Twitter user @AHappyChipmunk, when someone opened Google Maps and typed “bitches near me.” The results show up addresses of girls’ schools, women’s and girls’ hostels and PGs, and women’s clothing shops. Not only is this shocking because ‘bitches’ is often used as a derogatory phrase for women, but also these Google search results of schools put minors at risk.
The tweet caused much outrage and alarm among people, who did the search themselves and posted screenshots of the real time results that they got.
On asking ‘Bitches near me’ Google giving address of girls hostels, PGs:
So do you know that why would Google show these results?
Pranesh Prakash, a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, points out that this was telling of the fact that Google knows that ‘bitches’ can be a slang for women. “For many years now, Google has been trying to understand and search for what you meant, than what you may have typed,” he explains. “However, if you enclose this search phrase in quotes, you will not get the same results, because then it will look for the phrase.”
He also notes that if you were to look for “girls near me”, you would get similar search results on Google Maps, though more specific to women’s accommodations.
In contrast, it you were to Google, “bitch near me”, you would not get Google Map results. “I think that’s because Google understands that ‘bitches’ is more likely to mean women, than singular ‘bitch’,” Pranesh says.
