Google -- Getting Better, My Wish List

Kids around the world and getting ready to fire up their lists to Santa. I wasn't that kind of kid, but if I was I would write and tell my list of desires to the people at Google.

They've treated me right over the years, even though we got off to a rocky start. I'm an organic gardener and was trying to find some rare heirloom tomatoes. Way, way back my very first request to Google was to find me "Polish Sausage Tomato".

I felt like I wanted to wash my eyes with Brillo. My first job at 18 had been in an adult movie theater and I still hadn't ever seen some of those images before. I actually squealed. Bringing the three guys running from the other room. Sending me in a blind panic towards the monitor button and blacking the screen before anyone could see.

To this day I have never gone back to look again, taking the route of growing the close taste alike "Striped Roman Candle".

Several years ago Google has seemingly licked the "sudden turn into red light district" problem with almost any search I've chosen to make. Even some of the trickier, actual PG-R searches I've done like "lipstick lesbian" have turned up actual pages of people talking about their own experiences as rather than a dive straight to the modern day version of the seedy, commercial part of town.

Searches like those containing "Jew" still have some problems, and Google is frank in stating that they know the issue, don't like it either, and are trying to figure out a way to make Google better.

Searches based around the word "Gypsy" in its various forms are also straight to the meat -- the first few results pages reach actual Romany people, clothes they would actually wear, some fantasy pages where gypsies seem to be as makebelieve as elves or dragons, and a few about a bug.

The first outreach site attempting to discuss the problems of Gypsies from outside of the community is reached on page 6, result 53 and is a comparatively harmless attempt to convert the gypsy people to the evangelical faith. Many, many pages of links later and we're still not presented as scary (i.e., kidnapping children or putting curses on people), nor is anyone passing around a hat to raise money to counter the gypsy threat to anyone's way of life. Very good work, Google team, however you do it.

Next I Googled "blind". First link -- the NFB. by the blind for the blind, proclaiming a "positive philosophy about blindness". I notice as I Google through that blindness is treated very much like an ethnic identity, with negative pages and pure profit pages few and far between links to the actual blind community.

I tried "deaf". Same thing, same blend of sites with perhaps an edgier flavor to them. No one who deals with disability on a regular basis will be likely to deny that, all else being equal, the deaf community is a trifle more assertive than the blind community is.

Next I tried "autistic"

~~~~~tilt~~~~~~~tilt~~~~~~tilt~~~~~~~


What gives, and what can be done to change these results? Page after page of big organisations out to save/help/change/rescue the families of people with autism. Page after page of supposed cures, and the dramatic badness of it all. Crisis written in hot pink marker.

This is just not my reality. To borrow a turn of phrase from the NFB, “The real problem of autism is not the distortion of social connections , but the misunderstanding and lack of information which exist.”

What would it take for sites like http://www.autistart.com

http://home.earthlink.net/~tammyglaser798/authome.html
or even http://www.autistics.org/ to make it to the top of Google's hit parade? It's not like we're not out there, we are.

I started this blog to get out the word for people who need to know in a hurry what the options are. I was really upset when I took a look at what the computer-minded mother of an autistic on Supernanny would find if she went on a web search, and I was also really dismayed that when I needed the sort of support I was used to finding at a click when blindsided by a collection agency call (more on that later) there was little to be found for the suddenly financially disabled.

For years I've been dealing with newcomers to the world of autism and been giving out the advice "Don't Google. You'll just get more upset. I'll send you links and other people to help you get a grip on this. Hang in there. It's not so bad as it sounds."

Now it seems that the help I need from the world out there is similarly out there, but only acessable through mentors, what my mother calls "speakeasy style research" and what others call "calling on the A team".

I wonder if the time has come to do this better.

Oh, Google-claus, could you help us? I know exactly what I want for Christmas and I promise to be very, very good!

JulieB