Speaking of Google

I did a random check to see what the results of googling Jew are currently at. After seeing Google's polite explanation as to why they're scientists and not anti-Semites, I was surprised to see that the infamous jewwatch site was back at #1, while en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew was at #2. I would have thought by now, with the campaign to link Jew to the wikipedia site, that the anti-semitic site would be knocked out of the lead for good.

Curious to know if there was a pro-jewwatch campaign going on, I searched to see who was linking to jewwatch and compared that with who was linking to wikipedia. As of the last time, I looked there were 268 sites linking to the former, and 1,520 sites linking to the latter.

That does not mean my test is entirely (or even remotely) authoritative. It could be possible that the vast majority of the sites linking to the wikipedia site do not have the word 'Jew' in the near context. But the sheer difference in number of sites still seems strange.

To make it even stranger, however, the majority of the 268 results seemed to actually be from within the offensive site itself. Plus, if one does a Yahoo! search for jew, the site in question is not even in the top 20.

I am not a search algorithm expert and neither am I accusing Google of being anti-semitic. There is probably a perfectly valid reason for all of this. But this seems rather odd - at the least that this is possibly a weakness in the Google algorithm.

May 11, 2004 11:43 AM
7 Comments

PageRank is a quirky system. One link from a very influential site (with a very high PageRank) can put a site over another with many more incoming links. Another factor is placement - words in page titles are valued higher than words in the body; bold or large font size words are rated higher than plain text.

Here's a link to the original PageRank/Google paper by Page and Brin: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.

Pondered by Greg at May 11, 2004 01:02 PM

Also, you could probably come up with a good example of why this is such using http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3

Pondered by Greg at May 11, 2004 01:03 PM

Thanks! If you ever have time, I'd be interested to know your theories on why google ranks it so high, but yahoo doesn't. If you don't have time, don't bother, though.

Pondered by maphet at May 11, 2004 01:52 PM

Personally, I think this whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Had the one person not made such a big stink out of the whole thing, millions of people today would have still never heard of jewwatch. Basically, what happened was that jewwatch got tons of free publicity.

If anything, I find the search term 'jews' (plural) even more offensive. 'Jews' should link to a JEWISH site, not a Jews for Jesus site. I would think that people would campaign more against that. But alas, that is not to be.

Pondered by aishel at May 11, 2004 05:45 PM

Oh, and I forgot to add, I checked out Yahoo, and jewwatch actually is the first result. Although in Dogpile, it shows up as #14.

Pondered by aishel at May 11, 2004 05:51 PM

That's odd - I double-checked the Yahoo search and the first item is jewfaq.org

There is a related search of 'Jew Watch', though - is that what you meant?

Pondered by maphet at May 11, 2004 05:54 PM

Weird. Jewfaq is #3 and jewwatch is #1. The wikipedia listing is #2.

Pondered by aishel at May 11, 2004 05:56 PM