January 12, 2010 by Matt Thomas
The Google Suggest function, that generates a list of search queries you might be looking for as you type in a search, has generated some controversy this week, after Google were accused of programming it to favour Islam over other religions.
Ordinarily when you type a religion, i.e., Buddhism, Christianity, into Google, the search engine treats it just like any other keyword and brings up a list of phrases it thinks you might be searching for, based on searches that other users have performed. Some of these searches will of course be negative about the religion, even borderline racist – such, sadly, is the nature of the internet, though Google would argue that, as searches with enough volume, they should show up.
No one, as far as we’re aware, really had too much of a problem with this until Google users noticed that when typing in the word ‘Islam’ into the search box, no Google Suggest results at all were generated.
Google does make concerted attempts to filter out “pornographic terms, dirty words, and hate and violence terms” from the results, though never to my knowledge have they simply stopped showing results for a major keyword like this. A Google statement has blamed the issue on a software problem, “This is a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can.”
For now it’s probably best to give them the benefit of the doubt, though if it turns out that Google have been manipulating their results based on something other than simply propriety, it could open up a real can of worms with net neutrality advocates.
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