Communications of the ACM

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.