It’s time for me to reinvent this parenting blog and change it to a dad blog. My kids are older and “attachment parenting” isn’t necessarily the philosophy I’m going to be using to guide my parenting decisions as a single dad with a teen, a pre-teen and a fiery second grader.
Instead, I’ve registered the domain SurvivingFatherhood.com and am working with a designer to create something quite different from this attachment parenting blog. It’ll be a weird day to throw the switch and have everything on the new site, with the new design, but I think you’re going to love the results!
To get the new domain kick-started in Google, I have been asking friends to link to the current one-page ‘coming soon’ (and it’d be great if you would too, either a Facebook post, a Google Plus post, or a tiny snippet on your own blog or page) and gauging how it’s going by doing Google searches to see what happens.
And so I did a search for “survivingfatherhood” and look at what Google suggests:
Nice, eh? Can you see what’s happened here? Google’s decided that a search for fatherhood is really a search for motherhood and not just suggested it, as shown above, but actually uses that instead of what I bloody well typed in!
Not good. Not good at all.
I can complain about how this is another step towards the minimization of the role of a father in the parenting system, and about how mothers steal the limelight even as us often underappreciated men are crucial to the long-term success and happiness of children, but I won’t. I’ll instead just smile wryly at the irony.
I search for information on how to survive fatherhood and Google instead shows me information on how to survive motherhood.
Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Maybe men are pretty good at surviving this crazy father adventure and there are so darn many women searching for tips and advice on how to survive motherhood that they dominate the search and overrun the suggestion.
Then again, maybe not.
What do you think?
Well, let us know when your word processor “auto-corrects” it for you. Then we’ll know for sure that it’s one big conspiracy. :-)
In the meantime, I’d like to think that Google’s bias is based solely on overall search history, and that there really is more searching for “motherhood” than “fatherhood”. (Of course, if it “auto-corrects” the search, that could skew the bias even further.)
Whenever Google decides you meant something other than you typed, make sure to always click the “search for [value you typed] instead”, which (I believe) tells Google that it was wrong to “auto-correct” the search.
Apparently, Google doesn’t know the word “fatherhood”, as it adds red squiggles under it. (It’s Google, and not my browser, that adds them, as the same word is not “squiggled” in this text box.)
Also, Bing does not auto-correct it, and actually comes up with survivingfatherhood.com as its first suggestion.
That’s too funny and so poignant Dave! Evidently Google algorithms aren’t immune to social bias