Let us use technology to promote progressive unity not regression to the ages of apartheid!

But I maintain my previous point: black-box relevance ranking is inherently a guessing game, at least for queries where it isn’t possible to determine the user’s intent reliably from the query. In principle, knowing more about the user should better inform that guess. e.g., by improving the document priors. But I think that guessing the user’s intent is a wrong-headed approach when, as Feynman famously said, you can just ask.

I’m not sure how you would define, let alone determine, whether a search engine unknowingly wields power or unconscious prejudice.

For example, Google and Yahoo often return Wikipedia entries as top results. Cuil does not. Are Google and Yahoo prejudiced in favor of Wikipedia? Is Cuil prejudiced against it? And, in either case, what would be the broader implications of such a prejudice?

I return to my main point: search engines should not be making value judgments; they should be helping people make their own value judgments.

http://theangryblackwoman.wordpress.com/2006/05/07/some-things-you-need-to-understand-1/

I think it is problematic if one search engine knowingly or unknowingly wields power and/or unconscious prejudice, and lets that seep into how folks get directed to different sites.

Search results aside, Google has not seemed very responsive to complaints about their sponsored ads, yet another arena in which Google rather than its competitors could be argued to support institutional forms of various -isms.

~L

I’m actually giving RushmoreDrive an extended trial: I made it the default search for my browser. And you’re right, the results are different from Ask.com–I can see that myself now after more testing.

But the differences aren’t exactly black and white. On one hand, the query “apollo” (on RushmoreDrive vs. on Ask) performs as I’d expected: RushmoreDrive includes a results related to the Apollo Theater in its results, but Ask does not–through both include Apollo Theater in the Narrow Your Search list. On the other hand, the query “soca” (on RushmoreDrive vs. on Ask) surprised me: RushmoreDrive’s first two results are the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Soccer Organization of Charlottesville-Albemarle, while the top five results from Ask relate to soca music.

It strikes me as tough to tune a single relevance ranking algorithm to a population that includes over one in eight Americans. Granted, it’s even tougher to tune to the entire population of the US (I’m assuming that the global web search engines tune by country). I think that, fundamentally, a search engine shouldn’t be trying to stereotype me as white, black, or anything else, but rather should be helping me articulate my unique personal search goals. And everyday I’m less convinced that tweaking the relevance ranking function is the way to get there.

In any case, I do think the similarity in presentation style between RushmoreDrive and Ask is more than a coincidence, I found this blog post from April: IAC to Launch a Flurry of Niche Sites. I don’t know how much IAC is able to reuse its technology and content assets to create these sites, but it strikes me as a clever business strategy.

I have used RushmoreDrive.com and find it much better than Google, but I’m black so that’s no surprise — and thats the point of it, right? It’s not perfect — but its better at finding things that relate to us. I like that the search results are not just links, but include video, images, and news. Also, i tested rushmores results against Ask.com and they are different so I don’t think it’s just a skinned Ask.com.

As a member of Black community, I do appreciate that you gave it a try.