“My point, to be rather blunt, is that there is an ethnicity-specific search engine for white people: it’s called Google.”

Yesterday, the always interesting and smart Mathew Ingram wrote on RushmoreDrive, a search engine aimed at, depending on who you ask, African-Americans or ‘blacks’ in general. As with any mention of race in the tech blogosphere – a scene understandably dominated by the liberal-humanist ethos of equality and meritocracy – the site has generated some mild controversy and interesting reactions.

Ingram’s argument against the site is twofold. First is that race is a poor criteria for ranking search results, which seems fair enough. Is the colour of one’s skin a good predictor for what information one wants? If I as an ‘anglo-Indian-Canadian’ type in the term ‘popular song’ or ‘wedding practices’, could you (or even I) guess which results I’d prefer? Not really. Secondly, it seems there is an objection to the potential for ‘stereotypical algorithims’ – i.e. that there is something vaguely offensive in the assumption that a certain person, upon typing in ‘Whitney’, would rather find ‘Whitney Houston’ than the ‘Whitney Museum of Art’. Both, to me, are good points.

At the same time, the argument very clearly reminds me of the objections to Black History Month: that it is unfair and divisive because it pushes aside the idea of a sorta’-universal norm for the specificities of difference. But there was a great The Onion story once that started “[w]ith Black History Month over, U.S. citizens are putting aside thoughts of Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver to resume the traditional observation of White History Year.” When Ingram asks “Is it really that huge an inconvenience if someone searches for the word “Whitney” and gets something that is allegedly “white” like a museum of art, and what they were really searching for — Whitney Houston — is in fourth place?” he seems to ignore the aggregate effect of these microscopic things: that they are reflective of a norm that prioritises and normalises the concerns and interests of a white majority. If you’re white, then it may not seem like a big deal. If you’ve spent you’re entire life finding a significant portion of both your life and your identity not existing in the shared common space of the public sphere, its significance is somewhat more ominous.

In some sense, this is the simple products of numbers. In both Canada and the U.S., whites are in the majority and any search engine based on those numbers will reflect that. This is unavoidable and has obvious benefits. And while it is often ‘stereotypical’ to assume some sort of linkage between race and interests, we also need to also acknowledge that race, ethnicity (and sex, gender, class etc.) are factors that influence how one perceives both oneself and one’s position in society. To argue otherwise is to deny the real differences in culture and outlook that define a truly pluralist society.

If I were to search for ‘wedding traditions’, I’d likely get ‘something borrowed etc’. rather than the sangeet or the doli. My point, to be rather blunt, is that there is an ethnicity-specific search engine for white people: it’s called Google. And while the actual algorithmic approach of something like RushmoreDrive seems a half-assed solution at best – how are the interests of ‘black people’ determined? – even as it fails, it points out something fundamentally off about search engine results in a multicultural society.

Yet something like RushmoreDrive is still somewhat useful if we assume it isn’t one’s default search engine because of identity – “I am black, therefore I shall use RushmoreDrive” – but is instead another alternative when one is looking for specific results. In much the same way that I use google.co.uk when I need British results, perhaps search engines that do not assume that my interests are ‘normal like everyone else’s’ are just what I need.