Blackbird: The World's First African American Browser

Features

The Blackbird feature I was the most eager to explore was Black Search. The Blackbird site promised that it allowed for Google searches that weighted results to reflect African American interests.

The search box is placed conveniently in the corner.

Just click it and type your search in and it will load a results page. I decided to search for a term with a definition that was almost completely different depending on race. A word that should produce a clear difference between white and black.

Unfortunately, the resutls were disappointingly non-African American. There wasn't even a mention of Hendrix on the first page. The first result was Wikipedia and the second was the CIA Factbook of all things. I had to try something that would produce an even more obvious dividing line.

If anything, these results were even worse:

The number one result. Even white people don't believe that.

It's fair to say that search was a miserable failure, but there were still a few features to explore. I could turn the news ticker on and off, but no news items appeared. The Social Networks tab just provided links to MySpace and Facebook. The Email tab was similarly utilitarian.

The Most Shared feature allows users to share and rate news items and links in a dynamic system that doesn't work yet because seemingly everything only has one vote.