March 24, 2006

Keywords watch: Amazon changes the results for "abortion" on its search engine

This happened after an abortion rights organization complained, reports the New York Times. When search engines become politically correct, it is time to think of new search methods!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps. But all these search engines are designed to serve relevant results based on how language is used. If the way the system was automatically interpreting the meaning of language is not the way ordinary speakers meant the language to mean, then is it necessarily wrong for a search engine to manually make the result more meaningful?

I guess the tricky question is for something like this where there are likely two diametrically-opposed views for how that language is meant. But if that's the case, how could the search engine, on its own, ever be right?