Right. That does look odd.
Try "USA Inventors" and you'll see a very much whiter return.
"American" is often preceded by "Black" or African". "USA"... not so much. So Google assumes...
I doubt Google is assuming anything here. Almost everything Google is accused of in it's searches is really a case of a mirror.
As you say, "American" is generally proceeded by another term--but you missed "Native" as another common prefix. (There probably aren't enough Native American inventors to cloud the results, though.)
If the actual web page says "African American Inventor" and you search from "American Inventor" that's a match--Google doesn't care about extra words. If you search for "USA Inventor" it doesn't match, that page goes way down in the rankings (not completely off as once it runs out of complete matches it starts offering up partial matches.) Likewise, for "North American Inventor", it doesn't match and goes way down in the list.
I doubt Google is assuming anything here. Almost everything Google is accused of in it's searches is really a case of a mirror.
As you say, "American" is generally proceeded by another term--but you missed "Native" as another common prefix. (There probably aren't enough Native American inventors to cloud the results, though.)
If the actual web page says "African American Inventor" and you search from "American Inventor" that's a match--Google doesn't care about extra words. If you search for "USA Inventor" it doesn't match, that page goes way down in the rankings (not completely off as once it runs out of complete matches it starts offering up partial matches.) Likewise, for "North American Inventor", it doesn't match and goes way down in the list.
Yeah, that would seem to explain the results. I'm not sure why the phenomenon is limited in that way, though. For example, "American scientists" or "American mathematicians" gives almost all Black people on the first page, but "American physicists" does not. Maybe people don't search so much for American physicists I guess. But I'm not sure why.
But a search on Google gives a good number of results (without the quotation marks). I'm not sure what you'd call "relevant" here.Yeah, that would seem to explain the results. I'm not sure why the phenomenon is limited in that way, though. For example, "American scientists" or "American mathematicians" gives almost all Black people on the first page, but "American physicists" does not. Maybe people don't search so much for American physicists I guess. But I'm not sure why.
A search on Bing (Google is too much of a nuisance right now to bother) produces almost nothing relevant for "African American Physicists"--there probably isn't enough to show the effect.
