Overrated, Boring, and Dead

Elisa from Pop Culture Pirate  posted a few screenshots of what happened when one blogger  let Google's Predictive Text be the art critic by googling the names of a handful of famous artists:

"My personal concerns range from philosophical to practical. Google Instant’s ability to make “make things easier” limits free thought and replaces it with guidance based on the impulses of the lowest common denominator searcher. If you’ve tried the tool, you know that its seemingly random and absurd suggestions just encourage us to become that searcher. I’ve clicked those first couple of suggestions before I realized that my curiosity just promoted the absurdity higher to the top of the list. #Fail"

I though I'd do the same thing with a few well-known female writes. Results after the jump:

 

 

 

 

One of the more interesting things to note is that the top search results are about the writers as people, not as writers, but I doubt no one is surprised to learn that that Sylvia Path is remembered more for being crazy than for being a great writer. Although Google tells me that Dave Eggers is also overrated, as is David Foster Wallace, the latter gets "genius" as one of the suggested searches, a word I rarely hear applied to women. More tellingly, no suggestions come up for "female novelists are..."