Google's Keyword Planner tool was found to have a racial bias that equated people of colour with sexualised content, while exempting White people from such associations. 

Searches conducted by The Markup for "Black girls", "Latina girls", and "Asian girls" returned hundreds of keyword suggestions, with the majority being pornographic. And similar searches for "boys" of these ethnicities also primarily returned pornographic suggestions.

Meantime, searches for "White girls" and "White boys" returned no suggested terms at all, and nearly half of the results for "Black girls" were flagged by Google's own porn filter as "adult ideas".

This issue made it more difficult for marketers to reach young people of colour with non-pornographic content and services - a problem that had persisted in Google's ad-buying portal despite the company having addressed a similar issue in its main search engine years earlier.

After being contacted about the issue, Google removed the problematic terms from the Keyword Planner tool and stated it was looking into preventing such occurrences in the future.