This is not a post about academia, economics, or game theory. It is a post about life.
Today I am going to meet my French teacher for our weekly session, and I wanted to prepare an interesting topic for discussion. I pondered what can be an appropriate subject, and the words “the most gifted woman in the world” popped into my mind. Who is that woman and what did she do?
I typed “The most” in Google search bar. Auto-complete had few suggestions:
The most violent year
The most expensive car
The most expensive watch
The most dangerous game
The most beautiful woman
I went on. “The most gifted”. Auto-complete tried to read my mind:
The most gifted psychics
The most gifted child in the world
The most gifted man who ever lived
The tenth option was
The most gifted rapper in Nigeria
yet no mention of women.
Let’s continue. “The most gifted wo”. In how many ways can you complete this search? Two.
The most gifted child in the world
The most gifted person in the world
Fine, let’s add another letter. “The most gifted wom”.
Nothing. Not a single auto-completion. I beat Google. Probably everyone else know the answer and therefore nobody looked for it before me.
I am a stubborn guy. “The most gifted woman in the world”. Google is even more stubborn than me. They figured out that I mistyped my search phrase, and made few suggestions, in which the word “woman” was replaced by another boldfaced word: “child” and “person”. In fact, they thought that it is more probable that I search for “The most gifted psychics review” than for a gifted woman. Does this say something about me, about Google, or about the phrases that we search on the internet?
I did not give up and pressed “Enter”. The list that I got involved only (female) singers. Only? Almost. The tenth link was to “Support for Gifted Mothers: America Is Not a World Leader”.
I suspected that my misunderstanding with Google is due to language issues, and that the word “gifted” might refer to people’s vocal abilities, so I searched for “The most gifted man in the world”. Unfortunately I did not get any male singer. The first three pages referred me to the TV series “A Gifted Man”, number 30 pointed to King Solomon on a christian site, yet the title of number 32 was more promising: “Ten People with Unbelievable Talents”. Yes, I told myself, I finally got a proof that our world is full of chauvinism. I clicked on the link and found out that the most talented person in the list succeeded in pulling a truck with his XXXX. I did not bother to check the achievements of the other nine.
If this is the most significant accomplishment of men, no wonder auto-completion failed.
5 comments
April 29, 2015 at 6:16 am
Greg
My first three hits for the same search:
http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/psychological-needs/new-twist-gifted-woman-imposter
http://ncpamd.com/gift-women/
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/Page1.html
I see that it is a struggle to be a gifted woman. New post?
April 29, 2015 at 9:24 am
Stephen Edison
Your article is on point, but in your final sentence are you implying that only men coded the Google search algorithm? Oops.
April 29, 2015 at 10:28 am
Eilon
Hello Stephen,
It is interesting that people can read different things in the same sentence. Frankly, I meant something else. Your deduction, however, is much smarter than my intention.
April 30, 2015 at 9:16 am
Luca
Interestingly, this post appears at #12 when I did the search today. Gifted is most commonly used for children (at least in the US). Thus, searching for “the most gifted girl in the world” probably gets you the topic of French conversation you were looking for.
May 4, 2015 at 1:49 pm
rvohra
Dear Eilon
`most gifted fe’
also renders Google silent
but
`smartest w’
does autocomplete to smartest woman in the world
on MY google