Ever typed something innocuous into Google Search and found something horrifying? Google wants to change that. In a move that will help make search more ethically responsible, the search engine company has told Reuters that it has cut explicit search results for certain terms. It is also improving its AI for certain sensitive searches to help people find a way out of crises.
In an interview with Reuters on 30 March 2022, Tulsee Doshi, Head of Product for Google’s Responsible AI Team, said that the company has succeeded in reducing explicit search results by as much as 30% for terms covering ethnicity, sexual preference and gender. The move aims to prevent incidents such as one involving U.S. actress Natalie Morales, who tweeted in 2019 that she was typing the search term “Latina teenager” into Google for a research project and the highest-ranked searches were all pornography.