Safiya Noble was a speaker at the 2020 Association of Research Libraries fall forum, and attendees received a copy of her book prior to the forum. This is a heavily-researched in-depth look at how search engines (primarily Google) treats non-whites and women. Dr. Noble has conducted research into the algorithms that return racist or sexist results for seemingly innocent searches that begin with phrases such as "Black girls are..." or "Asian girls are..." At the time that she conducted her original research, such searches would bring up highly sexualized or pornographic results on the first page. Noble's research has resulted in Google's changing its algorithms to prevent this, as shown by more recent searches. Noble's research goes much further than these examples, and should be read by anyone who is a regular user of search engines; it's truly eye-opening!
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