When a reader enters search criteria in an enrolled website, Google AdSense embeds into the Web page of results ads believed to be relevant to the
search. Figures 1 and 2 show ads delivered by Google AdSense in response to
various firstname lastname searches.
An advertiser provides Google with
search criteria, copies of possible ads
to deliver, and a bid to pay if a reader
clicks the delivered ad. (For convenience, this article conflates Google
AdSense with the related Google Ad-words.) Google operates a real-time
auction across bids for the same
search criteria based on a “quality
score” for each bid. A quality score includes many factors such as the past
performance of the ad and characteristics of the company’s website. 10 The
ad having the highest quality score appears first, the second-highest second,
and so on, and Google may elect not
to show any ad if it considers the bid
too low or if showing the ad exceeds a
threshold (For example, a maximum
account total for the advertiser). The
Instant Checkmate ads in figures 1
and 2 often appeared first among ads,
implying Instant Checkmate ads had
the highest quality scores.
A website owner wanting to “host”
online ads enrolls in AdSense and
modifies the website to send a user’s
search criteria to Google and to display
returning ads under a banner “Ads by
Google” among search results. For ex-
ample, Reuters.com hosts AdSense,
and entering Latanya Sweeney in the
search bar generated a new Web page
with ads under the banner “Ads by
Google” (Figure 1c).
Rather, the list provides a qualified
sample of names to use in testing ad-delivery systems.
Search Criteria
What search criteria did Instant Checkmate specify? Will ads be delivered for
made-up names? Ads displayed on
Google.com allow users to learn why a
specific ad appeared. Clicking the circled “i” in the ad banner (for example,
Figure 1c) leads to a Web page explaining the ads. Doing so for ads in figures
1 and 2 reveals that the ads appeared
because the search criteria matched
the exact first- and last-name combination searched.
So, the search criteria must consist
of both first and last names; and the
names should belong to real people because a company presumably bids on
records it sells.
The next steps describe the systematic construction of a list of racially associated first and last names for real
people to use as search criteria. Neither Instant Checkmate nor Google
are presumed to have used such a list.
table 1. Black-identifying names and white-identifying first names.
White female
Allison
Anne
Carrie
Emily
Jill
laurie
Kristen
Meredith
Molly
Amy
Claire
Emily*
Katie
Madeline
Katelyn
Emma
(a)
(b)
Black female
Aisha
Ebony
Keisha
Kenya
latonya
lakisha
latoya
Tamika
imani
Ebony*
shanice
Aaliyah
Precious
nia
Deja
Diamond
latanya
latisha
White male
Brad
Brendan
geoffrey
greg
Brett
Jay
Matthew
neil
Jake
Connor
Tanner
Wyatt
Cody
Dustin
luke
Jack
Black male
Darnell
hakim
Jermaine
Kareem
Jamal
leroy
rasheed
Tremayne
Deshawn
DeAndre
Marquis
Darnell*
Terrell
Malik
Trevon
Tyrone
Black- and White-identifying Names
Black-identifying and white-identifying
first names occur with sufficiently higher frequency in one race than the other.
In 2003 Marianne Bertrand and
Sendhil Mullainathan of the National
Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
conducted an experiment in which
they provided resumes to job posts that
were virtually identical, except some
of the resumes had black-identifying
names and others had white-identifying names. Results showed white
names received 50% more interviews. 2
The study used names given to
black and white babies in Massachusetts between 1974 and 1979, defining
black-identifying and white-identifying
names as those that have the highest
ratio of frequency in one racial group to
frequency in the other racial group.
In the popular book Freakonomics,
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner report the top 20 whitest- and blackest-identifying girl and boy names. The list
comes from earlier work by Levitt and
Roland Fryer, which shows a pattern
change in the way blacks named their
children starting in the 1970s. 7 It was
compiled from names given to black
and white children recorded in California birth records from 1961–2000
(more than 16 million births).
To test ad delivery, I combined the
lists from these prior studies and added two black female names, Latanya
and Latisha. Table 1 lists the names
used here, consisting of eight for each
of the categories: white female, black
female, white male, and black male
from the Bertrand and Mullainathan
study (first row in Table 1); and the first
eight names for each category from the
Fryer and Levitt work (second row in
Table 1). Emily, a white female name,
Ebony, a black female name, and Darnell, a black male name, appear in both
rows. The third row includes the observation shown in Figure 3. Removing
duplicates leaves a total of 63 distinct
first names.
(c)
full Names of Real People
Web searches provide a means of locating and harvesting a real person’s first
and last name (full name) by sampling