Reading Annotation Blog 2.2

 Those assumptions are dangerously flawed; . . . unpacking the black box of the search engine is something of interest not only to technologists and marketers, but to anyone who wants to understand how we make sense of a newly networked world. Search engines have come to play a central role in corralling and controlling the ever-growing sea of information that is available to us, and yet they are trusted more readily than they ought to be. They freely provide, it seems, a sorting of the wheat from the chaff, and answer our most profound and most trivial questions. They have become an object of faith.5

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression : How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=4834260.
Created from wsu on 2023-02-21 23:54:35.

 In the modern day and age, search engines are everything to those with access to the internet; It's at the point where the google search engine has become a public resource to all, and some treat google search results like the bible, trusting it blinding before checking the sources. As much as we would like to believe all the information on google is correct, such is not the case.

As much as this is an allegedly "neutral" or "objective" algorithm, it is inherently biased in a way to "enhance" it's user's experience, however in some cases this would lead to misinformation, what the algorithm decides that is best for it's user might not always be the truth, or is affected by what google takes interest in, such as advertising other companies. As such, a form of algorithmic oppression comes into play here, where certain minorities and facts which the algorithm deems unworthy or bad for the user experience. Either that, or the algorithm enforces certain stereotypes based on common searches, as shown by Safiya in Chapter 1 of "Algorithms of Oppression". In these cases, the search is a mirror to human believe, as race or gender based stereotypes are not always true and most of the times are rather offensive to the targeted group, and having such an important website, such as google have it's algorithm stereotype them this way will just add on to the beliefs of more people to stereotype them.