Google promises changes to its map service after series of lewd and racist pranks

Earlier this week, there was massive outrage when it surfaced that Google Maps was displaying results for the White House, among other locations, when searching for the N-word and other racist terms. This situation followed closely after a prank in which a user created lewd images on Google's MapMaker, forcing Google to shut down user-created contributions to the community mapping tool.

Google Maps has now embroiled itself in another, far more serious, controversy. For whatever reason, the algorithm was showing results that were clearly offensive and racist. Whether or not this was an intentional creation of a human is another story. Regardless, the Google Maps team has stepped up to apologize profusely on its blog, saying:

This week, we had some problems with Google Maps, which was displaying results for certain offensive search queries. Like many of you, we were deeply upset by this issue, and we are fixing it now. We apologize this has taken some time to resolve, and want to share more about what we are doing to correct the problem.

Our ranking systems are designed to return results that match a person’s query. For Maps, this means using content about businesses and other public places from across the web. But this week, we heard about a failure in our system—loud and clear.

Certain offensive search terms were triggering unexpected maps results, typically because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place. This surfaced inappropriate results that users likely weren’t looking for.

It's hard to imagine that the team didn't foresee these issues when map locations were tied to "online discussions of the place." Perhaps it's due to the desire to flesh out its Google Places product, which would take reviews of a place and put them right there on the map search results page.

Interestingly, the team points to a 2007 algorithm change against "Googlebombs" as part of the solution, saying that they will start to update the ranking system "to address the majority of these searches." No word at all on why these results were showing for this search when a simple filter could have at least identified results as likely offensive  — or if there's any sort of human connection to the racist results.