Why is Google Blocking “Islam Is” Search Recommendations?
Notice when you start typing in the Google search field that it shows recommendations below the field? The recommendations are based on popular searches and a rather nifty algorithm that tries to determine what it is you are searching for.
But Google is intentionally blocking these recommendations for “Islam is…”
Try it for yourself. First, establish exactly what Google should be doing.
In the search field type “Christianity is” and you will see recommendations of “bullsh*t, not a religion, a lie, false, a cult, wrong, fake, dying, Jewish, and not a religion t-shirt.”
In the search field type “Hinduism is” and you will see recommendations of “monotheistic, false, polytheistic, the majority religion of, the oldest religion, not a religion, fake, most commonly found, characterized by, and wrong.”
In the search field type “Buddhism is” and you will see recommendations of “not a religion, wrong, not what you think, bullsh*t, polytheistic, a religion, false, based on what concepts, the best religion, and atheism.”
In the search field type “Judaism is” and you will see recommendations of “false, not a race, not a religion, a race, a religion of the book, not Jewish, a gutter religion, monotheistic, a cult, and a religion.”
Try typing “Atheism is” and you will see recommendations of “a religion, dead, not a religion, wrong, the new fundamentalism, growing, a non-prophet organization, so senseless, illogical, a religion supreme court.” Clearly they are not holding back on the Atheists.
Now, let’s try Islam. Type in “Islam is” and you will see…
Absolutely nothing. That’s correct. Google makes no recommendations based on searches of “Islam Is.”
Why is Google blocking search recommendations for “Islam is?”
Oddly enough, the two other religions I found that did not have recommendations were Asatru and Jainism. That may be because of their obscurity (after all, it’s been a while since Pascal tried to convert his friends to Jainism with his Wager). Obscurity or lack of searches does not explain why “Islam is” does not break down on Google.
So why is Google blocking the search recommendations? Are they afraid of offending Muslims who will likely retaliate against Google? Or is it as one person suggested on Facebook, an attempt by Google to simply ignore Islam?
Thanks to Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web for making this public and everyone at Atheism @ sub-Reddit for identifying the issue in the first place.
See an image of the results here.
Posted by Blair Scott
ROFLMAO! Typing “Christianity is” into my google search tool bar is hilarious. This is the best internet discovery since “I’m feeling lucky – French Victories” XD
Though, more on topic, maybe we should tell Google to stop being PC about Islamophobia?
The issue is not religiously based. There are many restrictions.
If you type “fagg” you get no suggestions. If you type “americans are “, you get nothing, but “americans will ” gives you a few results. “french are ” nothing, but “belgians are ” boring.
They are blocking because they are stupid.Islamists want you converted or dead you can’t appease such people.
This is just sad. How pathetic it makes Muslims look, that Google can’t even offer page titles without fear.
What’s sad is that you’re actually surprised by Google’s PC kowtowing to a group they’re deathly afraid of. How ironic that liberals whine about being bitten by the natural consequence of the loss of liberty when their “universally tolerant,” socialist utopia is implemented—then act like they never saw it coming…
Liberals and conservatives both are fucking this country over. Vote Libertarian!
You have to be kidding.
The image you link to says “Google: Now Serving Cowardliness”. You expect to have a serious discussion with that kind of jingoistic nonsense?
If google was really afraid of offending muslims would they make the muhammad cartoons so easy to find? Try typing in ‘mohammed’ in the same search and see what is suggested. Or try ‘muslim is’ etc.
“mohammed” is an unpopular spelling alternative and “muslim is” ain’t grammatically correct…
Islam is just a bunch of stupid violent insecure suicide monkeys, like the crotch bomber, 9/11 terrorists, unibomber, Fort Hood massacre murderer, ’93 WTC bomber, etc. Of course Google shouldn’t be censoring that, nor should Google censor the Tianamen Square incident that China did on its own citizen students. How many times must governments and religions fuck everything up before they learn that violence and lying/propaganda are bad? How long can Google censor the truth anyhow?
You must be a very happy person, as I hear “ignorance is bliss”. Whereas some of the incidents you have mentioned may or may not have been perpetrated by Islamic extremists, I noticed you included the Unibomber (which, incidentally, is spelled “Unabomber”). The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was not a follower of Islam. Why didn’t you include Timothy McVeigh in your list of Muslim terrorists, or the Crusaders, for that matter (Oh, that’s right; the Crusaders were intent on slaughtering every Muslim they came across.) The Unabomber was, near as I can figure, a follower of no religion. I suppose the difference is that the “stupid violent insecure suicide monkey” extremists of Islam are willing to die for their convictions; where stupid violent insecure Christian or Atheist monkeys prefer to kill from a distance. The true danger to society comes not just from Islamic extremists, but from ignorant intolerance, which obviously is not limited to just one religion or one group of people.
Have a nice day.
Funny, I don’t see anyone but the Islamofucktards blowing up planes and burning down embassies over a god damned cartoon. It is a PC fantasy to think the terrorism problem is not an Islam problem.
No, it’s a human problem. The Tamil Tigers are secular, they suicide bomb. Baruch Goldstein was a jewish terrorist. Timothy McVeigh was an xtian terrorist (regardless of his weak efforts to give the religion a free pass).
It’s true the muslims outnumber everyone, but they’re not an isolated example either.
How pathetically deluded and willfully misleading. McVeigh may have once considered himself a Christian, but NOWHERE is he on record as having committed his cowardly act of terrorism in the name of Christianity.
He was still an xtian, & he was a terrorist. He was avenging both the Waco incident (tell me THAT wasn’t xtian in any context) as well as Ruby Ridge (the Aryan Nation is xtian in subcontext).
Pretty amusing really, since you blat on about all the ‘atheist mass murderers’ who didn’t commit their crimes in the ‘name’ of atheism constantly.
But then, it’s the double standard we’ve all come to expect from you.
All you need to know about Islam
Unless Google actually has a statement on this, I don’t think we can conclude this is an intentional block, or done out of fear, whatever. I’ve seen stuff like this before (youtube altering search results, for instance), that turned out to be nothing.
If it is an intentional block, its useless. Try “islam was” or “islam will be”, you’ll see what I mean. How about “the quran is”, etc.
Maybe all someone needs to do is write a friendly email to Google to block a phrase and they do it. Maybe the phrase has too many noise occurrences and so is dropped. Maybe so much profanity follows “Islam is” on the web that it triggers an automatic decency content filter. I have no idea, I didn’t code the engine.
This is interesting.
I entered “The Quran is…” and got: Divided and subdivided into what, False, Wrong, A lie, Not the word of god, Corrupted, …
I entered “Mohammed is…” and got: Is a false prophet, The antichrist, A liar, …, “”, Satan, A pig, Jesus deep dish?
Looks like Google hasn’t PC-scrubbed everything, yet.
Call me crazy but I don’t see the problem with a private company favoring one group over another. They are as free to be as biased or PC as they like.
Ramen! If enough people stop using Googles services due to whatever actions they might take, such as the alleged censoring of certain searches related to islam, then they will change their policies or continue to lose business. Let the free market decide in the same way that I have standing orders at my business to not accept contracts from religious or zionist clients if they make their religion or politics known to us or if it is obvious. Ah! Liberty.
While I did defend the possibility that Google is not at fault for this in my previous post, I don’t agree that Google should be free to be as biased as they like. Google has obtained nearly a monopoly on internet search. This opens up the potential for abuse. Suppose Google decides to skew results for political candidates..driving favorable pages for the candidate they like, and negative pages for those they don’t. If people are not aware of a policy like that, they will likely expect a search for “Palin” and a search for “Pelosi” to have equal footing when they go to research those fine ladies. The free market does not take care of problems like this, because the abuse could affect the perceptions of that market (hence, its not really free). To level the playing field, the algorithms should be opened, and that would reveal once and for all if “Islam is” has been blocked intentionally, and for what reason.
Plenty of search engines out there, google isn’t a monopoly. If conservatives thought it was PC bullshit, I guarantee they would go elsewhere.
I think its a discrete preemptive act on Google’s part, which is entirely their right. It’s just pitiful that the religion of Islam has to resort to violence/threats to the extent that everyone else has to preemptively protect themselves with measures like that of Google.
I just hope that potential Islamic converts can see this before jumping onboard to becoming a Muslim. Things like this need to be made public so that everyone can see Islam for the paranoid fraud that it is.
[...] list of suggestions (based on phrases that have previously been used). But a couple of days ago, Blair Scott noticed something odd when he searched for information on Islam: In the search field type “Christianity [...]
Bing and Yahoo don’t censor suggestions for “Islam is.”
There is a statement from google, not on this particular term, but for a similar issue on a discussion here:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=25112ee0c29cbd01&fid=25112ee0c29cbd0100047a98d495176c&hl=en
Look at Google Employee Jem’s response:
“suggestions are generated automatically, and Internet fame can be fleeting”.
Here’s what I think is the real story here: someone has discovered that search suggestions, just about anywhere, are *inconsistent*. This due to their mechanical nature. From there, its pretty easy to find at least some hot-button term that produces no results, or skewed results, and then cry “Google is evil. Here is ABSOLUTE PROOF…Conspiracy!”. Of course, the conspiracy isn’t really pegged to Google, it pegged to the search target, who now seems to be conspiring to control Google, the great repository of all human information. In the discussion linked it’s climate scientists, in this discussion, its Muslims. Back on planet earth, however, there is simply no conspiracy, no terrorist behind the curtains, no Kenyan birth certificate, etc.
All the same, I’d still like to at least see Google put in writing a clear statement that ideology plays no role in producing search results of any kind. (well, we know it does in China, but they should spell it out for each region). Only complete transparency would eliminate reasonable doubt (the unreasonable variety would of course go unaffected), but I think that is unlikely due to Google’s interests in protecting its algorithm as a business asset.
Wow, Dave actually scooped Fox News with this. Too bad we’ll never see or hear about it in the lamestream, drive-by, state-controlled media…
The most damaging indication of Google’s bias is the last paragraph:
That’s not hard to do, since Faux Noise is considered a joke except for hardcore white guys who are pissed they’re losing power & can’t strong-arm people anymore.
So sad but so true.
I guess, it seems threatening to another when others don’t agree with their ideas and as a result they get blacklisted as I have experienced on this forum.
You must be joking. People get ‘blacklisted’ when they misbehave horribly. As it is, I don’t recall you ever being banned.
Those of you that think that Google has intentionally modified its search engine so that “islam is” yields no suggestions please raise your hands high so I can count how many “Dumber than dirt” T-shirts I need to purchase.
At the time that this thread was posted “Jews are” and “christians are” also yielded no suggestions. Oh and wait “american athiests is” yields no suggestions either. Most be a conspiracy! Do you just reserve your stupidity for the criticism of arabs?
Google is blocking Islam is, for the same reason they blocked “Freedom is,” in China. Google wants to make money and they are afraid to make Muslim Cultist’s upset. After all, when Muslim’s get upset, they tend to kill people. Google isn’t the only group to be scared of Muslims, the maker of 2012 had the same thought. “We won’t destroy the Kaaba because it’s not worth having a death threat cast against you for blaspheming the Perfect Man and his religion.”