Who is a Jew? Ask Google.
by Michael HoffmanWednesday, July 11th, 2007
I was reminded today about an email that I received years ago. It said that when you go to Google and search on the word “Jew” you get an neo-Nazi site. And so, this email went on to say, please put the word “Jew” on your site and link it to the Wikipedia page for Jew. This is what’s called a Google Bomb — when a group of sites get together to manipulate Google’s search results through the use of links. It worked right away, and the top search for Jew has been, for years now, a link to Wikipedia.
I hadn’t thought about this in a long time, but I had occasion to search on the word Jew again. In the Sponsored Links section of the Google results page (the Adwords links) there was an ad from Google, with the title: Offensive Search Results. When I clicked on that link, what I got was a nice window on how Google operates:
An explanation of our search results.
If you recently used Google to search for the word “Jew,” you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We’d like to explain why you’re seeing these results when you conduct this search.
A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for “Jew” brings up one such unexpected result.
If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:
* http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
* http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.aspSomeone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like “Judaism,” “Jewish people,” or “Jews” than the single word “Jew.” In fact, prior to this incident, the word “Jew” only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it’s likely that the great majority of searches on Google for “Jew” are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.
We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.
Sincerely,
The Google Teamp.s. You may be interested in some additional information the Anti-Defamation League has posted about this issue at http://www.adl.org/rumors/google_search_rumors.asp. In addition, we call your attention to Google’s search results on this topic.
There are a whole group of new companies challenging Google on search. Yes, it’s true. Google is great, but lots of results are useless. Some of these new companies working on better search are combining the algorithm — that automated formula that uses context and links to determine relevance — and combining it with human editors. The results are often better.
There are a growing number of these companies, including ChaCha (which has actual people helping you with search) and Mahalo which has edited results for the top 10,000 search terms and the algorithm for everything else. Will one of them create better search? Maybe they can. (In the end, I think all of those companies are really a play to get bought by Google or Yahoo or Microsoft.)
The charge against Google is that they are too reliant on the computer. They deny it. Google says that they are also looking at the role of human editors. But I think the letter above clear show’s Google’s belief in the power of the machine.
