A search engine for women

Feb. 20, 2008 - PRLog -- You turn on your computer, open your favorite search engine and write "film directors". The result: large lists with the best film directors of all time. Number of women in this lists: one, maybe two. Let's make another search, and write "football". You really must dive into the results to find the first webpage where women appear, at least playing football. Finally, we try our last search, "scientist". We can read the names from the most famous ones: Archimedes, Bohr, Darwin...but even the most famous female scientist, Marie Curie, doesn't appear.

Is the Internet just a mirror of our society, where the equality between women and men doesn't exist nowadays? The creators of Goo-Woman are very sure in this point: "We have advanced a lot, but there is still much work to do". This has been the main reason to start this project. Goo-Woman is a new custom search engine made for women, where female results related with the search will be boosted to be shown in the first places.

Goo-Woman (http://www.goo-woman.com) is implemented through Google's Custom Search Engine service, using keywords that will tailor the results for women, both emphasizing the best ones and preventing others, for example sexist websites, to appear.

Shall it subsitute other search engines? "Definitely not", says Ines, one of its creators. "It's just a symbolic gesture to remember that there is still a lot of work before we can talk of real equality between men and women". "But, beeing symbolic", she continues, "doesn't  prevent it from beeing completely useful". For example, you can find there movies made for and by women, female associations for different sports or even women oriented ####.

"We really hope that our work will be usefull for a lot of people" continues Ines, "but our only real desire is that in the near future we can disable our search engine and put instead a very big text: THIS SITE HAS BEEN CLOSED DUE TO THE ACHIEVEMENT OF EQUALITY BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN".

Website: www.goo-woman.com