Sweet Sixteen video games on this yr’s March Madness tip off tonight and tomorrow — all thrilling video games (like reigning nationwide champions Stanford vs. Maryland) and one that’s going to be deeply worrying for me personally (Connecticut vs. Indiana — go Huskies).

You’d be forgiven for considering that the video games began yesterday, although. As of this writing, looking out “sweet sixteen march madness” pulls up a schedule field for the lads’s event, which did have that spherical begin yesterday. The ladies’s video games are relegated to a ribbon on the backside.

This is the first year that the ladies’s school basketball event is ready to use the high-profile March Madness branding. The change got here after an uproar over the embarrassingly inequitable conditions finally yr’s ladies’s video games and one other few months spent highlighting the various, some ways the NCAA has failed its female athletes. It ought to be a yr to proper a number of the wrongs of the previous iterations of the event and to place the ladies’s recreation on the equal footing it has deserved for a very long time.

But issues nonetheless aren’t caught up on Google. When I looked for “March Madness” in Google, the very first thing that got here up is a field with the schedule for the lads’s event. The sidebar on the proper can be for the lads’s event. Scroll down, and there’s the outcomes ribbon for the ladies’s video games, however no actual hyperlinks to extra data. “College basketball championship” solely pulls up the lads’s video games, as effectively.

Google spokesperson Ned Adriance mentioned in a press release to The Verge that search takes issues like trending searches and recreation instances under consideration when it tries to grasp which groups or video games individuals are searching for and that Google has made improvements round March Madness. “When people come to Search to find women’s sports info and primarily find details for men’s teams, we know that’s not a great experience,” he mentioned.

It’s a irritating expertise for sports activities reporter Claire Watkins, who writes the publication for Just Women’s Sports and in addition primarily sees males’s scores pop up in her search outcomes. The ribbon tacked on to the underside of the lads’s event field doesn’t embrace vital particulars or hyperlinks for ladies’s video games. If she desires the detailed data field for the ladies’s event, she has to particularly add on “women” for any March Madness searches.

“I never want to type ‘women’ at the end of a search ever again,” Watkins tweeted.

The similar factor occurs once I seek for different sports activities utilizing supposedly gender-neutral search phrases: Champions League (which has each males’s and girls’s iterations), US Soccer (which has a ladies’s and males’s crew, and the ladies’s crew is far more successful). For each, the lads’s schedule is up first. Watkins informed me that her searches for issues like “Notre Dame ACC” appropriately determine that she’s searching for details about basketball — however offers her outcomes for the lads’s crew.

Adriance mentioned that it’s typically onerous for Google Search to disentangle sports activities data for causes apart from gender (like when a number of sports activities groups have the identical title), and that typically, the ladies’s iteration of a sport comes up first (like on searches for gymnastics or seaside volleyball groups). Search additionally pulls up outcomes based mostly on the prevalence of a kind of content material on-line — so if there’s extra “relevant, timely, and high-quality media” protection of a males’s sport, that may affect search outcomes. “That said, when it comes to our sports features, this is something we’re actively working to improve,” he mentioned.

It’s irritating to see one thing like Google make the argument that they won’t present ladies’s sports activities as a result of there may not be as a lot data accessible about them. Women’s sports activities are nonetheless making an attempt to shake off many years of being undercut by organizations just like the NCAA and underinvested in by networks and media. It’s a option to comply with behind that baseline de-prioritization quite than take lively steps to counteract it. Interest and viewership comply with from TV networks’ and tech corporations’ decisions round what to advertise. When these teams correctly spend money on and promote the ladies’s recreation, treating it as a product in its own right quite than a second-class subject, people watch.

Google search does this effectively with tennis — trying to find a event generates a rating field with the choice to toggle between the lads’s and girls’s matchups, and it’s straightforward to search out what you’re searching for. Adriance didn’t say if that was a consideration for March Madness.

Personally, I believe it could be enjoyable to simply swap issues round and have March Madness pull up ladies’s sports activities solely and pressure folks to kind in “men’s” if that’s the event they need to discover. But I’ll accept simply not having to kind in “women’s.” When I seek for basketball this month, the video games I’m focused on shouldn’t want that qualifier.