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, aimed to correct the internet's bias. Our objective was to create a new movement, complete with its own unique brand identity, based around a new tool we developed to highlight the incorrect searches and allow people to report them directly to the search engines. It needed to be bold, distinctive, and sharable, so we could get the world’s attention.

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.

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 Google 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.