Race row over Google image search of ‘three black teenagers’

He entered the term “three black teens” on Google and was shocked when the search engine displayed police mugshots instead of plain photos.

While its first implementations were seen – understandably – on Android, it took a little longer for the transition to take place on the web; we are now seeing Chrome being reworked under Material’s principles, and it now appears that the company’s stronghold, Search, may be on the verge of its long overdue redesign … In a screenshot posted on Tyagi’s Twitter page, the new design showed a familiar grid of floating cards in google.com search results. The background color moves from white to light gray, with white floating cards housing individual search results.

Judging by these search results, it can be argued that Google (or least its algorithms) is giving a disproportionate amount of priority to websites that are placing criminals’ skin colors before their crimes.

While Google has started implementing changes to YouTube for some users, the Search page still has yet to receive any love, that is, until the last couple of days. Of course, you can tell there’s some material design influence in the upcoming version, however not much else is different. Given this is just a limited test, there’s every chance this behavior will change if Google makes the Material Design layout the default.

Changes to the Twitter app include the addition of a tab bar at the top of a user’s screen with swipe functionality for nagivating to the Home timeline, Notifications, Direct Messages and other areas. The search giant also switched out the settings cog for the three vertically aligned dots. Right now, this is a small test, and it’s very likely that a lot of people won’t even see it until Google start rolling out the final version.