Is Google being biased with "happy white american couple" image results?

People have noticed that if you make a Google image search for "happy white american couple", the vast, vast majority of the results are images of black people. A few of the results may be of a white person with a black person.

Rather obviously this is blatant bias, political activism and social engineering by Google! They are censoring white people and promoting black people in their stead!

Or are they?

When I was made aware of this and I checked that it is indeed the case, for some tens of seconds I was tempted to believe that indeed, this is quite blatant and egregious behavior by Google. Why are they doing this? Quite clearly this is political and racial bias.

But then the rational part of my mind kicked in. Perhaps it's not that simple?

I mean, I wouldn't put it past them to do this, given their history, but there's actually a completely rational reasonable explanation for these results. It may well be that it's inadvertent and accidental.

How?

Well, by far the vast majority of the image results are stock photos. Stock photos usually are labeled and captioned in detail, in order to make it easier to find the kind of photo you are looking for.

Most stock photos of black people are probably labeled with the "politically correct" term "african american", which is where the search algorithm picks the word "american". Also, most of these photos in the results have a white background, and thus they are likely also labeled like "on a white background", which is where the search algorithm picks the word "white".

In contrast, it's very rare for stock photos of white people to be labeled as "american" because white people are rarely referred to in that manner.

What may well be happening is that the search algorithm is not looking at the words "white american" as one single expression, but at the two words in isolation, and thus picking photos of "african american couple on a white background", which explains the result.

As much as I would be tempted to blame Google for sociopolitical bias, I don't think that my intellectual honesty permits me. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

It gives credibility to this argument that if you leave out the word "american" from the search, ie. just search for "happy white couple", the majority of the results are of white people. It's that word "american" that's throwing off the results, for quite a clear reason.