Eariler this month there was an extremely popular story on Digg which told the story of a guy and an argument he was having with his girlfriend. In an attempt to prove him wrong, his girlfriend did what so many of us now do, she turned to Google for the answer:
I was arguing with my girlfriend about women not inventing anything useful. In an attempt to prove me wrong she Google “She invented” only to have ask Did you mean “He invented”
Why was this such a big deal? It just so happens that there are many, many women inventors from Randi Altschul (invented the world’s first disposable cellphone) to Grace Hopper (world’s first computer compiler) to Mary Walton (developed a method of deflecting smoke stack emissions).
I came back across this story today when I was looking at the most popular stories of the last 30 days on Digg and I went to Google to try the search again for “she invented”:
The Did You Mean “he invented”? is now gone and as can be expected the Digg story (which received over 200 links as tracked by Yahoo) is the top result. Was this “fixed” because of the Digg story gaining such relevance and being on a trusted domain or was this a Google fix?
One thing stories like this do though is show us how much we can sometimes rely on Google, forgetting that at the end of the day – Google is a robot. As much as Google helps us in our everyday lives – is it really making us dumber?
Bookmark this post:
38 Responses to “Women Invent Things Too – Google Fixes “she invented””
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Well I don’t think Google is making us dumber, but it surely is making us ask what are they doing to get smarter!
How can the robot get better at targeting sites that have proper content. Honestly, what this tells me is that nobody is optimizing for “She invented” so a story like the one on DIGG (a trusted domain, with potential to point lots of links) is going to take the first place.
If anyone wants to rank for “she invented,” now is prime time. LOL!
Awesome thing to share esp with a girl. Liked it. CooL
A superb funda of making the girls more dumb well i sincerely appreciate the harddwork done by the girls but still !!!bet if i get a chance i’ll simply remove her or she from google….
hahahaha
@ CommenT By Mr. PanT
Mr Pant Iam not sure wat u hv written has any kinda sense…!! Its all CraP.. whom u will remove…. Man Get sOme LogiC n dan TaLk…..
Its utter nonsense.. Men are always lazy.. “Women creates Man destroys”.. Idiotic!!!!!
well seriously this is something very sarcastic for girls …. but gooogle obviously has done a great job and i appreciate the hardwork done by them …..well MR. Bhagawati here thinks that , if he’ll get a chance he’ll change the whole world but lemme tell man it is not that easy …. and it needs a lot of hard work and i m dead sure sir u cannot do that , so let the girls be happy by removing their frustration here at this stupid…. no no no im sorry awesome website why are u bothered with no reasons ……. but one thing is for sure that girls are girls and cannot come over guys hahahahahahaha
Himanshu – you’re entitled to your opinion but please just keep the language clean (I edited out your use of the “F” word). Thanks..
I think neither women or men invents the things , the inventor is always a Human , beacuse only a good mind can invent anything , the dirty mind always try to destroy the things .So do not fight on these silly points
Himanshu, dont you have any thing to do in life? Why r u wasting time on such stupid topics? If you dont have anything to do, come to me. I will give you some work (and money). If you think you are not capable to work, go to sleep. The world dosent need you
God! Whats with you people?
Why cant we think ‘WE did’ instead of ‘man/woman did’ something? Is this some kind of a competition?
Himanshu, do you realise that it was not YOU who invented something? Let us give the credit to the genii who made our lives easier by their inventions.
God(donno he or she
)…shud think of reinventing Mr Himanshu Pant with a lil bit of sense this time….Man if u r planning to remove all “her” and “she” from google or elsewhere..just for a sec think of the lady..called ur mom(for ur info she is a she too)…now say…do u really want to do that???
Miss Pooja i dont know that how did you find this website , may be u were looking for the perfect mirror for you:)………….i care the damn about he or she, i respect ou emotions but please dont throw out your personal emotional….. with no offence i would like to say that girl like u shud be recreated…. before writing in a forum u have to think twice but unfortunately it needs brains and that u dont have dont be personal to someone here…..and yes if u wanna say something to me u can mail to :himanshu.pant6286@gmail.com
but obviously watever it was a mistake or an intention but google has done something very good and very sarcastic for girls…. so u also njoy here……and before ur next update think twice:)
I see a woman invented the chocolate chip cookie. Were would we be without these great woman inventors??ahhahahahahahah one more thing It was also an accident. She was trying to make chocolate cookies and thought the chocolate would be absorbed by the dough… Not exactly the brightest inventor out there.so Girls just leave it ……….
THIS IS SIMPLY WASTE OF TIME… WITHIN THIS TIME WE CAN INVENT ANOTHER THING… (MAY BE A WOMEN..)
Had a nice laugh reading the e mail i got today, i checked..but unfortunately it has been fixed.
ahhhh…cant belive i missed out on this!
christ it’s like somebody left the door to the dumbass cage open. Normally I’m not so uptight, but there are these new inventions called “grammar and spelling rules” that really help when you are trying to belittle whatever sex you don’t belong to. I honestly hope that some of you never get the chance to reproduce.
Have a nice day
Google might be wise to something here…
Try “her logic” and see for yourself.
*sigh* I think its sexist to call something sexism that is an actual trend.
Now that everyone is done having a purse swinging tizzy of a fluke in page rank technology, how about you show me statistics on what PERCENTAGE of inventors are women?
In a world with 6.5 billion people, a counter example isn’t all that hard to find in social instances, for example name 5 organs no human has ever been born without.
Thus to understand something one doesn’t needs rules so much as trends.
Fact: Women invent less than men.
Fact: Of the top ten inventions that have improved human life the most, I’ll bet at least 8 were men.
For the record I credit women with the invention of medicine/science/philosophy as a matter of primitive likelihood. Gathering is more conducive to contemplative thought than hunting in my opinion. But that’s like saying protozoa invented humans, in that it’s a bit of a butterfly effect.
Brandon – not much of a critical thinker, are you? Just because women have not had the opportunity to/nor have been given credit for something, does not indicate that they are incapable of it! Good grief, are you really so naive?
Google is a statistical machine. Google is not sexist. The demand to have it’s results altered to fit our idea of what is politically correct however, is. The fact is, the phrase “she invented” occurs so infrequently on the pages Google crawls that is was interpreted as a typo.
My guess is the VAST majority of global patent holders are unsexed (corporate) or male. Even discounting Corporate patents the trend I would say, holds.
USPTO.gov does not allow one to search by gender. But it does allow one to search by name. Toss in a few male names and then a few female names, you’ll see the tip of the ice berg.
“Yanisky-Ravid found that Israeli women accounted for just 1.9 percent of the inventors who registered their intellectual property in 2000-2005.”
Now that may be a policy problem in their country but it’s not specifically gender biased. The fact remains most of those credited with invention officially are men.
If you have a problem with facts being reported accurately, I’d say you fund an initiative to endow female inventors, or go be a creationist.
Men have abstract minds. Men dominate technology fields. Women can profit through men much easier and much more acceptably than the other way around. When a man rides a woman’s coat tail he’s a loser or a dead beat, when a woman does it she’s a home maker. Now I agree, that sucks, but tailoring Google results to hide this fact is a disservice to women, and rather Chinese in thinking.
For hundreds of years if nothing else women were footnotes in industry, that’s just how it was. Even if 50% of all current and future inventions were made by women, the stack would still be heavily in the male camp.
P.S. I’m a patented inventor.
OWNED! hahaha
I'm agreeing with Brandon, but also, disagreeing. I'm sorry to say, but, women arent just footnotes in history, or in technology. We are the ones who give life to men like you, who think of us no more then a "Home maker" It is sad yes. But we are very accomplished and do not need men. Some of us are stupid, dumb, and have no mind of our own. Thats when guys like you come in, to take care of those women. I on the other hand try to represent the women with imagination, and intelect, and..Well who cant spell xD. I may be only 14, but I know I have more intelegence, more brains, not much bronze but, i have to ability to leave highschool and go to collage and make it out there in the world. I will not become a gold digger, a little whore and so on, and i REFUSE to become a "Home Maker". Thank you
and I dont mean to be like, killing you Brandon, Im just typing 
Thanks!
Tremendous, never thought that it would go this long. Few of us wrote at the very beginning of this blog, Primarily it was just a prank on gals but now it has become a solemn dispute, Let me tell you whatever it is but I endorse what Brandon says.
If someone thinks that gals have really been good so far then come up with acceptable examples. We all would love to know.
Men have always proven to be on top for an example top 10 CEOs of the world. ALL MEN
1.Jonathan Schwartz (President & CEO, Sun Microsystems)
2. Craig Newmark (CEO, Craig's List)
3. Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks)
4. Ross Mayfield (CEO, Socialtext)
5. Matt Blumberg (CEO, Return Path)
6. Alan Meckler (CEO, Jupiter Media)
7. Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect, Adobe)
8. Robin Hopper (CEO, Founder – iUpload)
9. Jason Calacanis (CEO, Weblogs)
10. John Dragoon (CMO, Novell)
And as Brandon says” If you have a problem with facts being reported accurately, I'd say you fund an initiative to endow female inventors, or go be a creationist.”
I would rather appeal people come up with facts which well precise and significant. Thus we can take this further.
Here I would like to apologize to gals. I realize most of the women don’t imagine beyond their area of interest which is more likely shopping makeup dresses etc (YOUR ATTENTION: creativeness is not incorporated in etc). Even in future male would be dominating every field of the corporate world.
we started off very well…
i think that the mutualism of both genders renders both sides of this debate moot. Maybe men invent more. Maybe they are simply reported to have invented something more. And as for the guy who was bashing on chocolate chip cookie lady because it was an accident…
two things.
1) Chocolate chip cookies are amazing. And i love the woman who invented them with all my heart.
2) most inventions are accidents.
Just saying… Mr. Pant….
you are disservicing our gender with your sexism and lack of logical reasoning.
I'm a sixteen year old guy with raging hormones demanding that I assert myself as better than females (sorry that's just biology) and i'm thinking straighter than you.
And by giving your to support to the Sarge…you were hurting his cause. Badly.
go back to your country. men dominate
At the end of the day both man and woman have invented good things that have changed the world, google stuffed up and made an educated guess that you pushed the S key with out knowing. It is because of people with little education that google must do this, thus if you spell somthing wrong it corrects you. A great invention is the condom, it was invented by a male and made better by a female, and some of you need to invest in this great invention because you will be helping society.
God, you aren't kidding.
I couldn't even decipher what that guy was talking about. But I could tell it was completely not what i was talking about.
You misunderstand completely. I have the utmost respect for supportive figures in history. All I'm saying is that those services aren't typically written down, and thus Google won't see them, or put another way, in terms of history, if it didn't get written down we have no idea that it happened.
I did not mean to suggest that women did not participate in history I meant to say that they were not given credit in historical account due to past sexism.
Given the interconnected nature of society I'm quite sure that you could say "if it weren't for woman/women X would never have been invented." What i meant by footnote is the sexist men writing the history books down played or omitted entirely the contributions of women, thus rendering the record itself sexist, and thus Google was giving us "just the facts ma'am."
That being said I will reiterate, that men are more likely to invent, given the structure of our society and typical gender role pressure, regardless of female capability.
Maybe his mom was calling him up to dinner from her basement and he was in a hurry?
Hmmm i'm not gonna judge on that one.
i think you have a point here… you are correct. had you been a bit older you could have thought but i can understand a 16 year chap cannot think beyond what you are saying. so practically i agree with you and things are invented accidentally. but if you check the history and facts you'll find the truth. and anyway one lil advise to you don't take it personally.
i don't take it personally at all. But thought I may be young, I think what I said still is true. Maybe a litte revison or adding on is in order though. Women contribute. Men contribute. In different ways. That's not to say they cannot do each others' (i don't want to say jobs but…) jobs. I'm thinking like a football team has linemen and secondary (receivers, backs, etc.) now then, a tight end can play either a lineman or a receiver. and in some formations a back. My views. And it goes both ways.
i completely agree to what u saying see if you go to history there are several major inventions by women lets take the biggest example of Madam Curie, This debate is on women due to some technicality or a bug which Google has fixed now. so lets take it in a easy manner and lets just not take it as a matter of sexism.
it isn't sexist
im surprised none of you figured this out
to google he and she are just words nothing more and men have invented more things because women weren't allowed to
therefore the phrase he invented has higher numbers in the results than she so google is designed to look at facts and take initiative and give the most likely question
google is a program and doesnt know about equality
what is so useful about a disposable cell phone?
well I disagree that u don't need us…..if there werent us, men….human race would be extinct….so u need us as much we need u….we make a baby, u give a birth to it….so we role a same part in this big story called life
Whoops, the link at the end of my comment didn’t work properly. It should have said .