The internet has a bias.

Search algorithms are trained on human behaviour, designed to give us what they think we’re looking for. Now, they’ve learnt our bias towards men.

Asked simple, non-gendered questions, like “who has scored the most goals in international football?”, search engines prioritise the more recognised male athletes, even when facts say it’s a female athlete - making women and their achievements invisible.

So Team Heroine, a women’s sport marketing agency that seeks to connect female athletes with brands to ensure they're better recognized in a world where women’s sport receives just 0.4% of media coverage and 4% of total sponsorship, aimed to correct the internet's bias.

Our objective was to highlight the incorrect searches and get as many people as possible report these inaccuracies to the search engines so they could be corrected, and the achievements of sportswomen would become visible for all to see.

We created an initiative that used the power of the people who use the internet, to right the wrongs of it. Our mission: Correct The Internet and make the achievements of sportswomen visible.

The only way to correct search engines is by people sending direct feedback when they find inaccuracies. So we developed a tool that highlighted the incorrect searches that create the bias, and allowed people to report feedback messages containing the correct information directly to search engines with just a couple of clicks, to elicit a clear response from each search engine - correct this search.

The importance of this issue, and our simplified way of reporting direct feedback on the long list of incorrect searches, saw the world quickly take action. Search engines received these messages on a scale they couldn’t ignore, making them to take action, too.

Internally, this problem has been on search engine radars for years, with many teams experimenting solutions.

Monetised opportunities often take priority, so these teams struggle securing resources to implement solutions.

To make them prioritise this problem, we focussed on:

-External pressure (PR/awareness) on marketing/business, targeting the ‘trust’ pillar of brand health tracking which we know is monitored.

-Internal engineering pressure via bug reports from millions of users, to prioritise our corrections.

We conducted an audit of simple, non-gendered searches across Google, Bing, Yahoo & Baidu, collecting search results that used incorrect statistical data to create bias. We quickly discovered 50+ incorrect searches and added them to our tool for people to report.

With 50+ inaccuracies that affected different countries, sports, teams, and athletes, we revealed new stats each day until we saw change, each targeting a new audience, creating enough internal and external pressure for the search engines to act.

With a limited budget, we needed to cut through and earn disproportionate attention.

While empowering 'you go, girl' communications have their place, they wouldn't suffice.

Looking at previous campaigns, we could see this message didn't travel far enough or significantly change the narrative around women’s sports.

Instead, we needed to provoke outrage.

A study from NYU found that every word of moral outrage added to a post (tweet) on X, such as “disgusted” or “disgrace”, increased the repost rate by +17% [1].

If you want a message to be shared across social media, the best strategy is to provoke outrage.

There's a reason people remember the Suffragettes more than the Suffragists.

Just as they understood over 100 years ago, if you want to challenge ingrained biases, a "softly softly" approach isn’t effective.

In New Zealand, this holds even truer.

Social equivalence is one of New Zealand’s defining cultural codes [2]. Nothing riles up Kiwis more than someone not getting a “fair go”.

When it comes to women’s sport, systemic injustice is everywhere; from the ongoing fight for equal pay [3], to unequal facilities [4] or sexist commentary [5].

But, one of the most glaring injustices was staring at us from the homepage.

Humans are biased. Which means search is biased, too.

Search engines hold up a mirror to the good, bad and ugly parts of society [6], including gender bias.

Search was especially biased against sportswomen.

If you Google, “what’s the tallest building in the world?”, you’ll see the Burj Khalifa.

Aesthetically it might not be your favourite skyscraper, but you can’t argue about whether it’s the tallest.

Equally, you might not be an avid fan of women’s sports, but many records are - objectively - held by women.

But when asked objective sporting questions, search favoured the more famous male athletes.

This bias was across all sports.

Lydia Ko has won the most golf majors for New Zealand. The England Roses have won the most consecutive rugby tests. Eugénie Le Sommer has scored the most goals for France.

All were invisible.

But, you can’t be what you can’t see.

Biased searches don’t just reflect existing bias; they reinforce it [7].

Because search has made many sportswomen's' achievements invisible, the next generation looking to follow in their footsteps don’t see themselves represented. They didn’t have as many role models.

We needed a people’s movement to urgently create change.

So first, we created a film that would highlight the problem and be shared on social media around the world.

In the spot, we see a young girl in New Zealand’s national stadium.

But instead of people in the seats, there are rows of smart-speakers.

The girl asks, “Who has scored the most goals in international football?”

The speakers respond “Cristiano Ronaldo” in robotic unison, reflecting the bias.

The spot concludes with a call to report incorrect search results at CorrectTheInternet.com.

Then we directed people to an online tool we’d created to manually report biased search results in just a few clicks.

We launched our tool with a confronting film that showed what happens when a little girl asks the internet a question and is met with biased results. This was followed with daily social content that highlighted our list of incorrect searches, prompting people to help us report each one, along with street posters, billboards, a PR pack, an educator’s pack, a campaign look book, iconography, a website - and the tool itself.

Inspired by activism design, the campaign uses a simple duotone scheme of orange and black paired with bold typography to maximise its visibility.

The mark comes from a combination of the female symbol and search icon. The crossbar of the female symbol doubles as a crossed-out device echoing the redaction and search bar used in our ‘statistic’ search query.

The search results are overlayed with the correct sportswomen and factually correct information.

Our campaign reached over 1 billion people globally.

Had 120+ pieces of media coverage, including BBC, NBC, Fox News, Sky Sport & Forbes.

Millions of people reported to search engines through our tool, social channels, and the media.

And we’re now supported by over 50 global brands, including the United Nations.

When we started, the search results never showed sportswomen.

Although people can be served different results based on location, demographic and search history, we are now beginning to see change to many of the searches, correctly recognizing a female.

Now, a problem that has existed within search engines for decades has new momentum and is being solved, with search engines deploying new features to highlight women’s sport, offering both male and female results on searches.

And now, Correct The Internet is part of UK/international government enquiries into misinformation, to help change the future of the internet.