Jewgle

So, Google has taken the very interesting step of apologising for some of their search results. Apparently, there's been a lot of fuss recently from people who have searched for the term Jew and found some anti-semitic content - specifically the top ranked site, 'Jew Watch' (which I shan't link to, for obvious reasons, go look it up if you feel the need..). This has been an issue, I discover, digging deeper, since April 2004, which has recently resurged for whatever rhyme and reason is driving the internet's fickle attention span, and Google are sticking to their guns by returning any site which meets their guidelines (mostly related to not cheating on SEO) and is legal in its host country, but in this case apologising.

This brings into the spotlight the interesting question of search engine morality - should providers be returning results which may be extremely offensive to a proportion of people likely to be looking up a specific term?

Personally, I'm with them on this one, as there are so many other search terms which result in extremely offensive content - and removing all of these offensive sites would cripple their business. Indeed - morality is always relative - I'm sure that the anti-semites running Jew Watch find some of the Jewish websites returned to be extremely offensive too. With something as dynamic and anonymous as the internet, it becomes so difficult to establish a common moral consensus that it's best to simply make available all of the information people wish to create, and allow the end user to decide which sites to give their attention and respect.

I think the real answer to this problem however, is the original meaning of that horrifyingly ubiquitous buzzward (buzzward; n; 'a misued and bastardised buzzword' - anyone else fancy helping this word I just made up take off? *grin* - I've just added it to Urbandictionary at the link above) Web 2.0 - a semantic web with each item associated with metadata. Microsoft have had a stab at this with Tafiti but the real problem's going to be convincing content producers of the value of adding real metadata to their information. For example, once JewWatch is properly associated with the metadata 'anti-semitic', then it's a simple query to filter it, along with other related sites, out of a query for 'Jew'.

Here's Google's apology, for those of you who are interested, by the way.

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As to how I stumbled across all of this just now; I was attempting to track down a little story I'd heard at work about an online store run by a Jewish couple who are very strict on their faith. So strict in fact, that they still honour the tenet of not working on Shabbat - and as such will allow users to view items on their website, but will not accept any orders between sunset on a Friday and sunset on a Saturday. They even go so far as to change this every week to take into account seasonal variations, and calculate it from the physical home of their webserver. They really do have a kosher machine..amazing.

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_{When I next connect to the Microsoft corporate network, and they notice all the anti-semitic websites I've spent my weekend visiting, I'm so going to get sacked...}