Technology

Came into the comments to say the same thing.

What do you mean there are other countries outside of the US?

Google literally tells people this is how it works.

Agreed, I realized this happened when I was a kid, so I started searching mostly in English for doing school work, the exception being assignments related to history and other regional/national subjects.

has nothing to do with Google customizing results based on location, which many commenters seem to be assuming.

Because that's what the title says. Language isn't location.

Different results based on language is even more obvious of a fact than location, though. It would take an insane amount of work to prevent, even if it wasn't obviously the desired outcome.

So it is about languages instead of “where you live”. Can’t Harvard researchers get the title right?

Or are they assuming that languages are only associated with where people live?

language is intrinsically tied to culture, history, and group identity, so any concept that is expressed through a certain linguistic system is inseparable from its cultural roots

i feel like this is a big part of it. it reminds me of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. search results and neural networks are susceptible to bias just like a human is; “garbage in garbage out” as they say.

the quote directly after mentions that newer or more precise searches produce more coherent results across languages. that reminds me of the time i got curious and looked up Marxism on Conservapedia. as you might expect, the high level descriptions of Marxism are highly critical and include a lot of bias, but interestingly once you dig down to concepts like historical materialism etc it gets harder to spin, since popular media narratives largely ignore those details and any “spin” would likely be blatant falsehood.

the author of the article seems to really want there to be a malicious conspiratorial effort to suppress information, and, while that may be true in some cases, it just doesn’t seem feasible at scale. this is good to call out, but i don’t think these people who concern their lives with the research and advancement of language concepts are sleeping on the fact that bias exists.