Google apologizes for Jews, alters searches

[maz]

An article worth revisiting

Google In Controversy Over Top-Ranking For Anti-Jewish Site

Google has added a disclaimer to the search results that come up in a response for a search on jew, to counter complaints about an anti-Jewish site that until recently ranked number one.

The disclaimer appears at the top of the search results page, occupying either the banner-like space above Google's unpaid results that has long been used for paid advertisements or comes atop the paid ad area on the right-hand side of the page. It reads:

Offensive Search Results
We're disturbed about these results as well. Please read our note here.

The pseudo-ad (it even carries a Sponsored Link disclaimer) leads to an explanation from Google saying that they don't endorse the site.

The explanation also implies that because the word "jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context, this had caused Google's automated ranking system to rank Jew Watch -- apparently an anti-Semitic web site -- number one for the query.

The Jewish Journal (and perhaps other sources) wrote about the query back in March, but the story picked up wider attention in April.
Risky Intervention

The result has left Google in a tricky situation. The company doesn't want to manually alter or rank the sites that appear for any query. Such "hand manipulation" might make it seem as if Google doesn't trust its own automated search algorithm. A likely bigger fear is that changing one query will leave Google open to pressure to change others.

As a result, Google was put in the strange situation of defending the Jew Watch site as coming up tops because Google's ranking algorithm supposedly "reflects the popular opinion of the web," as it told News.com.

Google has added a disclaimer to the search results that come up in a response for a search on jew, to counter complaints about an anti-Jewish site that until recently ranked number one.

The disclaimer appears at the top of the search results page, occupying either the banner-like space above Google's unpaid results that has long been used for paid advertisements or comes atop the paid ad area on the right-hand side of the page. It reads:

Offensive Search Results
We're disturbed about these results as well. Please read our note here.

The pseudo-ad (it even carries a Sponsored Link disclaimer) leads to an explanation from Google saying that they don't endorse the site.

The explanation also implies that because the word "jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context, this had caused Google's automated ranking system to rank Jew Watch -- apparently an anti-Semitic web site -- number one for the query.

The Jewish Journal (and perhaps other sources) wrote about the query back in March, but the story picked up wider attention in April.
Risky Intervention

The result has left Google in a tricky situation. The company doesn't want to manually alter or rank the sites that appear for any query. Such "hand manipulation" might make it seem as if Google doesn't trust its own automated search algorithm. A likely bigger fear is that changing one query will leave Google open to pressure to change others.

As a result, Google was put in the strange situation of defending the Jew Watch site as coming up tops because Google's ranking algorithm supposedly "reflects the popular opinion of the web," as it told News.com.

Intervention In Removing, Not Altering Ranks

Of course, Google does indeed intervene manually in search results. It removes material because it may be deemed illegal, as was the case in the infamous chester guide search. The company also removes material in response to DMCA complaints and also because for spamming reasons, as this article explains further.

Such interventions make some marketers confused (or even livid) when they read Google's oft-repeated claims of no hand manipulation of search results. To them, such removals as I've described above are hand manipulation. You can get a flavor of such confusion in this recent WebmasterWorld forum thread.

These interventions are not specifically rank related. When they happen, Google doesn't try to reorder the ranking of how a page appears. Instead, it simply pulls the page from the index entirely. And if you aren't in the index, you naturally no longer rank number one. But to save confusion, it might be better for Google to be clearer in saying that they don't chose by hand which sites rank well.

By the way, I asked Google previously about the reference in a Wired article about wanting to "attach" better sites to queries to ensure it had good information available. I remember being disturbed by this, just as some in the aforementioned thread were, as it indeed suggested that Google was doing hand-ranking in some cases.

I was told by Google that this was a misinterpretation on the part of Wired. The Google engineer apparently meant that the Google search algorithm would be tweaked to produce better results, not that the results would be reordered by hand.
Apology, Potential Improvement, But Complications

In new developments, Google is apparently considering how it might somehow flag what it determines to be hate sites, perhaps as a means of warning its searchers.

This came out as part of an apology by Google to the Anti-Defamation League. But one now wonders if Google will find itself having to apologize to US president George W. Bush and his supporters because Bush still comes up first for miserable failure or to US presidential candidate John Kerry because of the latest prank that makes him number one for waffles.

The above is not said to downplay the serious offense many Jews and others felt when they learned of the result for the query "jews" on Google. It's intended to highlight just how complicated the situation is becoming for Google -- and potentially other search engines -- as the public takes a much closer scrutiny at search results.

It may be that Google will have to start indeed considering manual intervention into actual rankings, especially given that the latter two examples of Bush and Kerry have come about through overt attempts to make those results happen. But the danger Google could get into is also illustrated by what happened when AOL did this.

As I wrote earlier, AOL altered the results its gets from Google to manually remove the Bush listing from the top of the miserable failure search. That didn't rectify the problem for liberals like Michael Moore and US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who'd been targeted by conservative linkers in the way Bush had been targeted by liberal linkers.

Where'd It Go?

When I started working on this story on Friday, April 23, the Jew Watch home page was the number one ranked site on Google for the query jew. The site had been bumped to the number two spot some days before but apparently rose back up. However, something completely new happened when I went to file around 5PM Eastern time that day. Jew Watch suddenly no longer ranked in the top results at all.

In fact, the entire site appeared to have been dropped from the index at Google.com. To verify this, I ran a special search to see all pages that Google.com knew about from the jewwatch.com site. No pages were listed.

Cont.

[Ognir]

Danny Sullivan, April 24, 2004

They had to be in place to block and shill the different 911 movements