Well this is thoroughly depressing... googled “women murdered in 2020”...

[AngeloMysterioso]

And this is the top result. “Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2020”

Women don’t even get to come first in searches about our own murder statistics.

I use firefox and avoid a lot of the propoganda.

Firefox with Ecosia browser, its easy to install, just download.

And that's one of the many reasons I don't use Google anymore.

There are a lot of hits relating to the femicide census - it's pretty weird that one of those wasn't top of the Google search from a U.K. location.

This is the first 2 pages of what I got from Google. Search was "number of women murdered in 2020"

The results are exactly about that- no mention of trans women.

@ErrolTheDragon

There are a lot of hits relating to the femicide census - it's pretty weird that one of those wasn't top of the Google search from a U.K. location.

That is exactly what I got from Google in a UK location- possibly my browsing history is less slanted than the OP's?

I don't use Google and I got the same as OP when I used it for the same search...

I got exactly the same results using Google.co.uk as the OP using women murdered in 2020 and using number of women murdered in 2020 I got the same results as @MissBarbary did

Using safari on my phone, same results as the OP. I don’t think I’ve ever searched for anything to do with trans women so nothing to do with my browsing history.

DuckDuckGo is perhaps worse

Top result
Ad for sexpartner20plus

@CrossPurposes

I got exactly the same results using Google.co.uk as the OP using women murdered in 2020 and using number of women murdered in 2020 I got the same results as *@MissBarbary* did

Is anyone here "techie" enough to explain why the two (slightly) different searches give up such differences in the answers?

It's suggestive that word frequency is slightly different

One uses the word woman more , the other talks about number of women more

Other explanations possible

Adding uk to the query also gives a more expected answe than the original question

I looked through a few pages and randomly dipped into items. I found some tendency in some towards counting transwomen alongside natal women.

I also learned a new word along the way; 'heteroflexible'.

Using Google, of the first 10 results using those words to search, 5 are referring to trans women. The first 2 are about TW.

Is anyone here "techie" enough to explain why the two (slightly) different searches give up such differences in the answers?

Apart from the inclusion of the word 'number', maybe it would tend to get results more about statistics than individuals? No surprise that doing a different search gives different results, anyway.

@midgebabe

DuckDuckGo is perhaps worse

Top result
Ad for sexpartner20plus

Urgh. I think DuckDuckGo always gives an ad link first - I got eBay offering 'The Women's Murder Club' . I think I'm so used to it I usually just ignore the ad links, there are probably quite a lot of grossly inappropriate items thrown up for some searches.

Normally I am a reader of forums rather than a poster, but I have an interest in bias in Tech so, here goes... I got similar results to AngeloMysterioso in that this ‘Human Rights Campaign’ organisation based in the US appears at the top of a list of sites about the murders of women in the UK. (I have set my Safari browser to return UK websites when I search.)
Google’s search algorithms are notoriously biased. The bias in Google’s auto-complete function received a great deal of press attention in 2016 during the USA’s presidential election www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/google-autocomplete-rightwing-bias-algorithm-political-propaganda.
Since then, Google claims to have made some improvements but, as algorithms are devised by humans there are inherent biases. Also, organisations can pay Google to have their website links in a prominent place. The fact that this US-based ‘Human Rights Campaign’ appears at the top of a list of search results for the UK leads me to think that Google had some arrangement with HRC to highlight their website. I took a look at their partners and, of course, Google is one of HRC’s gold partners.
If I’m searching about something that I am not familiar with, I usually avoid the first page of search results and move further down the list to see what Google is not prioritising. Some of what is returned may depend on your location and previous searches.
Just want to add that I have been so moved and inspired by the postings in this forum over the last few years and thank you all so much for being here.