Search engine for blacks takes on 'white Google'

Los Angeles: Is Google too white? No, we're not talking about the white home page that's so bright it motivates some people to change its appearance to save energy. We're wondering if it is too white, as in Caucasian, because so many white people use Google that it returns results that alienate the rest of the population.

Johnny C Taylor thinks so. In April he launched RushmoreDrive, a search engine that returns results more targeted at the black community (it's named after the North Carolina street where its offices are).

"Someone said to me, "We don't have a white Google; why do you need a black Google?'" he said last week. "And I said, "Of course you do - It's called Google.' "

By way of example, he said that a black person searching for "whitney", for instance, probably wouldn't be looking for the Whitney Museum of Art, which comes up first on Google, or Whitney Bank, which comes up second.

Instead, Taylor said, the searcher probably would be looking for Whitney Houston, who doesn't come up in Google until No 4. That's why a search for "Whitney" on RushmoreDrive, which is part of Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp conglomerate, turns up the vocalist as its first result.

How does a website know what black people want?

RushmoreDrive did a lot of research, watching where web surfers who lived in certain areas with large black populations, such as Atlanta, were going online. The site's creators made note of what black users were clicking on and developed an algorithm that gives "black" links more weight. A search for "diabetes", for example, shows the American Diabetes Association as the first result on both Google and RushmoreDrive.

But RushmoreDrive shows "statistics about African-Americans and Diabetes" as its second result and a link to the diabetes section on blackhealthcare.com as its fifth.

Search engines return results based on pages that they crawl through, but they can't crawl through every page on the internet. RushmoreDrive also digs deeper into pages it thinks black people might visit more, such as soul food site chitterlings.com, Taylor said.