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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The upshot is that when you begin to type something in, Google will now offer you a list of suggestions for what you might be typing to save on keystrokes, these suggestions will also show the number of results in green on the far right hand side. It’s all very impressive, no doubt, but is it actually an improvement?

For me, it might just be a case of over engineering, a very fancy, technical way of making things a bit more difficult rather than easier, since people tend to repeat searches a lot.

Let me explain what I mean. If you’re in the pet care business you’re going to want to do a lot of pet related searches. Under the old system, if you typed in ‘pet’, you’d get all your former searches up for you to pick from, you could then return to one or modify one slightly with only minimal typing. Now your suggestions would include, ‘Peter Jones,’ ‘petrol insurance,’ and ‘PETA.’ Not quite as useful maybe Google?

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