Google hadn’t even been born — much less conquered the world — when Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble was a student at Fresno State in the late 1980s and early ’90s protesting against apartheid, arguing for social justice and pushing for racial and gender equality on campus. When she wanted to “search” for something, she did it the old-fashioned way, in the library: She thumbed through yellowed card catalogs, hunted through ghostly microfilm and perused voluminous abstracts.

In many ways, those pre-Google lessons that Dr. Noble learned at Fresno State, and the real-world smarts she was able to develop thanks to the tight-knit community of fellow activists she connected with there, are a big part of what made her the scholar she is today.

Now a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, she’s been studying Google and other Silicon Valley behemoths, all the while arguing for accountability.

Dr. Noble will speak on April 20 at 6 p.m. on her book, The Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, a pointed critique of how Google and other search engines marginalize people in “erroneous, stereotypical, or even pornographic ways.”

The event will be held in the Henry Madden Library as part of the J. Printise Womack Lecture Series.

Dr. Noble has come back to Fresno State as a distinguished alumna before, notably as the commencement speaker at the African American Graduation Recognition Ceremony. Each time she is struck by the impact the University had on her. She had originally wanted to go away to college outside of Fresno, but family circumstances meant otherwise.

“I kind of begrudgingly went to Fresno State, and it became one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” she said.