Dylann Roof, convicted of murdering nine people in the Charleston church shooting, is an example of the importance of this issue. Roof said he did a Google search to find out more about “black on white crime” and that the first site he came to was a white supremacy site, which in turn may have shaped his motivation to carry out the murders, as this NPR story tells. . Google no longer lists this site in the first page of its results. Bing does, at the time of this writing. I suspect that even if Google's top results didn't have this site, Roof might have kept searching until he found information confirming the bias he already had.
Another part of his “manifesto” espousing black hatred comes from what he called his own “real life” experience, not Google searches. But stay. Getting results as fair as possible is important, as impossible as it may seem. Research is difficult. A big challenge jewelry retouching service for search engineers in the past was dealing with overt spam trying to achieve high rankings. Now they have to tackle “post-truth” content where pages that seem factual or informative to an algorithm can be anything but. We need to
continue to keep Google and search engines high and highlight areas where things are clearly going wrong. But we must also understand that perfection will not be possible. With imperfect search engines, we need to use more human critical thinking skills alongside the searches we perform – and teach them to future generations. Life itself rarely has "one true answer" to anything. Waiting for Google or any other search engine to give it to them is a mistake.