Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt had two special guests on their podcast show this week to talk about how Google approaches inclusive language in search – a topic we briefly covered only once before over here. The short version of this 30 minute podcast is that Google Search will automatically handle inclusive language, like it does with any new type of terms or slang used.
The two guests were Zineb Ait Bahajji and Bruno Cartoni who work on this area at Google.
Inclusive language aims to avoid offense and fulfill the ideals of egalitarianism by avoiding expressions that express or imply ideas that are sexist, racist, or otherwise biased, prejudiced, or denigrating to any particular group of people (and sometimes animals as well). Use of inclusive language might be considered a form of political correctness; often the term “political correctness” is used to refer to this practice, either as a neutral description by supporters or commentators in general or with negative connotations among its opponents.
Zineb defined inclusive language as “a language that is actually free from words or phrases that are stereotyped or discriminatory. So for a very long time and in many languages, like French, for instance, the masculine form was the default expression in any context. So for example, people would say, “During the executive meeting, chairmen are leading the discussion.” But this could be a chairwoman. But the masculine would actually be used.”
About 8 minutes into the podcast, the Googlers describe some efforts they make in Google Search to make it more inclusive.
In French and in German, there is more and more this tendency to abbreviate the feminine and the masculine form together. So for example, instead of saying “étudiant” or student in the masculine form, and then to add and “étudiante”, so the feminine form– we would just contract everything together with a special character. So it would be “étudiant” followed by a special
character, like a dash or a slash, and then the final ending “e”, which is the feminine form. And more recently, we witnessed an increase in use, especially in
French, of a very special character, the middle dot, which is called in French, the point median. You can now find it on Google Gboard on mobile phone by long pressing the dot key.
John Mueller explained that Google goes about indexing for this purpose in three ways.
(1) Indexing – finding the words within documents and then expanding those words to include “some of those words into the appropriate versions.” John said “maybe drop the punctuation, if that’s kind of like not a natural word
boundary, but actually a sign that what is meant here is their different versions.”
(2) Ranking – John said the ranking, which John said is “all about the serving side of things.” John explained “we’ve seen from the previous episodes of the podcast that we do automatically kind of expand the query that we see, based on known synonyms, abbreviations, different versions of different words, and in practice, these systems tend to run automatically.” So Google is able to handle inclusive language and ranking it automatically.
