Racist Google Searches Take Users To White House

Search giant Google has been forced to apologize after Google Maps users found that searches including racist slurs directed them to the White House.

Searches including the racist slur “nigger,” including “nigger house” and “nigger king,” took users to the seat of the U.S. government. Those searching for “nigger house” from any part of the world, and “nigger king” when focused on the greater Washington D.C. area, were directed to the White House, writes Samuel Gibbs for The Guardian.

Highly inappropriate search results

“Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologize for any offence this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly,” read a statement from a Google spokesperson. The Washington Post was responsible for discovering the error on Tuesday, but at the time of writing there has been no explanation as to why the results are occurring.

Google has been in race-related controversies before, including racist auto-complete suggestions after users type “why.” Another controversy arose after Google’s ad system was found to be 25% more likely to display ads for criminal record checks if a search for traditionally black names was performed.

Despite the fact that both systems are automated and predicted based on data collected from billions of searches, Google still landed in hot water. Recently the company was also forced to shut off the crowd-sourced Map Maker system which it offered on Google Maps due to a series of pranks, including one which showed an Android robot relieving itself on an Apple logo.

Google struggling to keep control of its results

According to the company, Google has been experiencing “escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months”. It is not yet known whether the latest racist incident is due to a third-party hack or arises from a Google algorithm.

The results could occur due to the actions of a rogue employee at the company, or a “Google Bomb.” The latter refers to an incident where users flood the site with a specific keyword in order to trick Google algorithms into changing its results.

Horrified social media users took to Twitter and Facebook in order to demand the rectification of the situation. “So I just goggled the word ‘Ni–erhouse and the White House popped up. If that ain’t racist I don’t know what is,” wrote one Twitter user known as Gizzle.