In this day and age the Internet and popular search engines are more sensitive to matters of this nature, right?
At least we all hope they are.
Have you seen this screenshot?
I personally can’t think of what would prompt someone to search for this particular phrase, but I’m sure Google has seen its share of weird and wonderful searches in its time.
No one knows if Google’s response (did you mean black people …) is genuine, but a lot of people obviously believe that it is. The first time I saw this screenshot it tickled my funny bone. It’s truly funny – at least on the surface – to think that someone would take the time off to conduct a search about a group of people who may or may not have stolen his car. It makes you wonder that if he knew who stole his car in the first place, why ‘search’ to find them. Also, it occurs to you that his search is a bit too general to yield any worthwhile fruit.
I suppose the poignant message is that the search engine giant, Google (if indeed it was a legitimate response) thought that there was no way this group of people could’ve done something so uncouth. Seeing that 50% of my close family is white, 30% black and the rest, shades in-between, I don’t know if I should be laughing or crying.
I think that the bottom line is that we who’ve seen or received this screenshot hope that it has indeed been tampered with in some way, or that this is a line of a song or something of that nature. After all, in this day and age the Internet and popular search engines are more sensitive to matters of this nature, right?
At least we all hope they are.
September 6th, 2009 at 5:44 am
Can’t see it being a ligit screenshot but hey I guess its probably computer generated so maybe. Ooops…hope they have sorted it if it is!
RJ
September 6th, 2009 at 6:12 am
Hi Anne,
Great piece. I hope that this is just a silly meaningless search. I can’t believe that in this day and age we don’t know that there are thieves in every race and color. If we don’t believe that, just watch the evening news. Therefore, anyone could have stoen the car. This has got to be a prank, I hope.
September 6th, 2009 at 8:25 am
That’s scary! Whether it’s a prank or computer generated, it looks like search engine can be racist too!
September 6th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I always taught my children to be descriptive in other areas because I hated for them to focus on race when we are basically all the same. When we focus only on race we miss the bigger picture. It’s pretty sad to see a screen shot such as this. I wonder what Google says.
September 7th, 2009 at 11:16 am
I tried putting it in as a search phrase, and the result just showed that there have been a lot of people searching with that phrase, so I guess if it was a real screenshot, Google have changed the response since it was made.
September 7th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
i think it was just a joke… i hope so anyway. Great piece
September 11th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Hi Anna and everybody I am new here.
I hope it a joke. But it is a stupid and a racist one.
Fazi
September 12th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
I cant even be bothered to read the rest of the comments, basically you do this by first searching (”blck people stole my car”) black must be spelled incorrectly for the spell check to pick it up and then when it finds it you replace the word blck with white in the search box. how ever it appears that google has made some changes which prevents this from being achieved so easily now.
September 13th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
um, does nobody realize that the Google “Did you mean?” prompts are based on similar searches to what you are looking for but that what you are looking for hasn’t come up often enough?
October 5th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I found that very strange, I am sure that had to be so sort of computer glitch?
October 8th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
isnt it obvious what happened? the person mispelled black when he type black people stole my car. then when the screen said did you mean “black” people stole your car, he changed his search to white people stole my car to make it look as if google was racist. its a joke. clearly google wouldnt do that. geeeeez