(Un)intentional sexism on google search?

[Keaveny]

Facebook friend shared something on the transgender issue that I thought was basically a rehash of cartesian dualism (female brain, male body), and so I searched on google to see if this had been discussed on Mumsnet. I searched "cartesian dualism site:mumsnet.com".

The search came back saying it was a difficult search, and gave an example of "try using "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake"".

Image attached. Is that the kind of thing we should be searching on MN?

The error message isn't specific to the site. It would have given the same 'cake recipe vs how to bake a cake' example if the site you'd set it to search was bigclevermentalkingaboutclevermenthings.com

I'd've taken that as just an example of how to re-word your search?

bigclevermentalkingaboutclevermenthings.com

I love that site!

That's what I thought, but I tried pistonheads.com, and didn't get the same result. Try it for yourself

I just tried it and I don't get the error message at all for pistonheads, because it finds results for 'cartesian dualism'. I thought you were objecting to the error message but is it to the fact that it doesn't find the term on MN even though you know it's been used?

My point is that it does find results for cartesian dualism on MN (See image) as it does on pistonheads, digitalhead, but only on MN do I get a handy advice for rephrasing my search in terms of cake recipes.

I didn't get the error message when doing the search on Mumsnet, but that might be because your thread is now here and maybe this thread is a "great match."

I do get weird sexist vibes off this but I think that probably the "cake recipe" thing is a generic example and is not the result of algorithmic sexism.

I wonder about the "great match" thing - like if Cartesian dualism is more frequently discussed in a context of teenage redditors stroking their metaphorical knobs while imagining themselves profound, has the algorithm decided that women talking about it isn't a "great match" for the search term? It is a bit weird. There are other exact matches besides this thread for "Cartesian dualism" on Mumsnet.

I had exactly that response - try cake recipe etc - from Google yesterday. I was looking up info about restrictive covenants on deeds.

It wouldn't be the first time the GOOG was sexist. It's baked in, since it's fostered by 90% techbros.

But minor technical point: the syntax for a specific site search is

site:.mumsnet.com

The period before "mum" is important. If you put in the whole url, www.mumsnet.com, then you don't need the period. The period tells the search engine that this is part of a url, not one of the words you're searching for.

The way it understood your query was that you wanted all three terms in one web page. When I tried it with the period, you do get lots of results of the two words on mumsnet pages.

In fairness recipes and cake baking are standard responses when the idiots flock to mn. (Joke)

I searched on 'cartesian dulalism mumsnet' and quite a few results came up featuring the threads that have mentioned the topic. Not sure how to do screenshots though.