Nigerian model Agbani Darego is popular for being the first black queen to win Miss World contest in a very captivating fashion.
Roughly 18 years, 10 months and 17 days after the historic feat, Ms Darego made headlines for reasons antithetical to what made her famous on the 16th of November 2001.
On the 2nd of October, a Twitter user Growth Queen with the handle @Oluremi_x took to the microblogging platform to reveal that search results for “Who is the ugliest Miss world” presents Agbani Darego’s profile.
I find it interesting that the results to "Who is the most beautiful Miss World" on Google shows links to various rankings.
But "Who is the most ugly Miss world" gives you Agbani Darego's profile, full stop. pic.twitter.com/HFcto0vQLr
— Oluremi Martins (@oluremi_x) October 2, 2020
The discovery drew reactions from Nigerians who expressed displeasure with many judging that the search engine result was racist.
The Heritage Times looks at reasons behind the development.
To start with, Google is not human but an engine run by search algorithm. It is the algorithm that presents useful and relevant search results for queries or questions.
It is also worthwhile to note that there is no published article on the ugliest miss world at the time of writing this article. As such, the algorithm ignores the keyword “ugliest” and provides results for “miss world” considering search location (Nigeria).
In other words, the algorithm considers articles on Agbani Darego profile or biography to be relevant or useful for queries coming from Nigeria because she is Nigerian.
More so, a search for the most beautiful miss world brings out Agbani Darego’s Wikipedia page on Google’s first page because the engine deems her profile to be relevant or useful for having most of the keywords used in the search query.