[depaya]

I was curious about this, so I decided to think about what Google's image search probably does and apply Occam's Razor...

It appears the image search is closely tied to the overall web search; the images returned are images from pages that match the search terms.

What would I expect a search for something like "white inventors" to return? Are there lots of websites cataloging inventors who are specially white, or discussing inventors specifically because they are white? Probably not, why would there be? But what about websites discussing non-white inventors, or talking about white vs non-white inventors? That seems much more likely to me since discussing and/or promoting a minority is more notable and common.

So it seems like the algorithm has decided to categorize "white inventor" and "black inventor" in very similar ways - both search terms are returning results relating to inventors of different races, whereby a non-white inventor is more interesting since it's the exception. I don't think it is surprising that these search results are as they are, and this seems much more likely to me than the whatever the alternative is that you are suggesting.

On a related topic, if you search for "black people" one of the image results is King Kong, and it comes from a website discussing comparing black people to monkeys. Another one of the images is (white) Mitch McConnell surrounded by other white people.

If you want an image search engine that is returning images whose content matches your search terms, there are tools that specifically focus on this.