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Racist bug/easter egg discovered in Google Maps

JoeMorgue

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JoeMorgue
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Typing a combination of a racial slur and the word "house" into Google Maps is pulling up the White House for some users.

Howard University alumni Bomani Buckhalter told the Huffington Post that friends told him that searching "N***** house" in Google Maps pulled up 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Buckhalter said that the search doesn't work for everyone, though many in the D.C. area have been able to duplicate it.
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Full story at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...e-house-racial-slur-president-obama/27640023/

Note: I literally just tried it Google Maps on my Moto X here in NE Florida, and... yeah it worked.

I know I'm sure my address search history has gotten me on some sort of watch list.
 
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JoeBentley said:
Full story at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...e-house-racial-slur-president-obama/27640023/

Note: I literally just tried it Google Maps on my Moto X here in NE Florida, and... yeah it worked.

I know I'm sure my address search history has gotten me some sort of watch list.
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How do anyone ever find this unless whoever put it there leaked it to some.

Reminds me of about 20 years ago at a tax software company someone changed the a line on the New Jersey individual tax form to say Jew Jersey. I found it before it went out.
 
ponderingturtle said:
It is pretty likely. The problem is that google decided to crowd source their maps to a degree.
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I just logged in to Google Map Maker to see if someone there had requested the addition to the White House name and then enough other users had approved it. That's what happened some idiots signed up to edit and got enough friends to sign up as well allowing them to propose the addition and then approve it.

Currently I'm getting a message saying they've taken the editing feature offline until they can improve the moderation/approval system. I'd seen pranksters make weird funny changes to Google Maps before but usually they were not so offensive and where reversed pretty quickly.
 
Technically it's not a bug -- it's an *******. One is an organism, the other, part of an organism.
 
ponderingturtle said:
It is pretty likely. The problem is that google decided to crowd source their maps to a degree.
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Not according to Google in the CNN article on this topic.

They say associations like that are built up by correlating data from blogs, and forums and other websites.

Once those words are found together often enough Google will automatically file them as associated.
 
paulhutch said:
Google maps results are location dependent but if you add Washington DC to the search it will work from anywhere.
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It works here too. But it gets even stranger. Google Maps for me consistently calls the premises at that address, not by its English name "The White House", nor by the perfectly acceptable and used Dutch translation "Het Witte Huis", but in a strange mixture of English and Dutch, "The Witte House". :eye-poppi
 
Molinaro said:
Not according to Google in the CNN article on this topic.

They say associations like that are built up by correlating data from blogs, and forums and other websites.

Once those words are found together often enough Google will automatically file them as associated.
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Actually that was not Google quoted in the CNN article, http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/20/technology/google-maps-fixing-n-word-problem/index.html
The reason for the problem is unclear, but one search expert thinks it's likely due to how Google links certain phrases and terms to locations on the map.

"What we think is the cause, is that Google is seeing how people are talking about places on blogs, and Google's making those associations," Danny Sullivan, the notable founding editor of Search Engine Land, told CNNMoney.
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If you go to Google Map Maker and log in with a Google account you can see the user edits where they added a lodging place inside the White House (now reversed) that led to this problem. FYI while reading up on this I found out that for a while there was a gift shop added inside the White House named "Edward's Snow Den".
 
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-20/google-apologizes-******-house-search-result
Google Apologizes
The link doesn't work unless you replace the forum's censor **** with the word. Or search for "Google Apologizes for [put word in] house.

"Do no evil..." that is part from the racist stuff, would appear to be Google's new meme as The Guardian reports the somewhat unbelievable fact that searches which include the racist slur “******” were shown to find the White House in Google Maps. “Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offence this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly,” a Google spokesperson said, claiming that it had been experiencing “escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months”.

As The Guardian details, searches for “****** house”, in a global view of the world, and for “****** king”, when focused on in the Washington DC greater area, return with the home of the US president Barack Obama as either the primary search result or one of three.
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It is not the first time a Google search-based product has appeared to be racist. In 2010, the company’s search auto-complete system suggested racist queries after simply typing “why”, while its advertising system was shown to be 25% more likely to bring up ads for criminal record checks when searching for traditionally black names.

Both systems are automated, taking user input from the billions of searches performed using Google to predict likely queries and results.

But Google was also forced to shut off its crowd-sourced Map Maker system for Google Maps, which allowed user-generated corrections and additions to maps, after pranks including a picture of an Android robot urinating on an Apple logo.
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Trolls will troll. I don't see why anyone should take this to the media or why the media should care, just report it to google and move on. Publicity just gives the trolls more giggles. Are we going to report every wikipedia page that gets vandalized now too? Maybe if it was reported and no corrections were made there would be a story.
 
eeyore1954 said:
How do anyone ever find this unless whoever put it there leaked it to some.

Reminds me of about 20 years ago at a tax software company someone changed the a line on the New Jersey individual tax form to say Jew Jersey. I found it before it went out.
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The original Sim City had a copy protection system where they would show you some code and you had to look it up and type in the name of the corresponding city. So one day I get the code and the city is Detroit. So I typed in in correctly. Error message. Okay, try again. Still no go. So I looked closely at the sheet and started laughing. It said "Detriot", not Detroit.
 
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