FWIW, Google searches for:
- "Islam is dangerous" produced 14.5 million hits in 0.21 seconds
- "Islam is evil" produced 15.3 million hits in 0.39 seconds
- "Islamic law is oppressive" produced 1.32 million hits in 0.41 seconds
- "Islam promotes violence" produced 7.5 million hits in 0.36 seconds
In each case, many of the results on the first page hardly can be considered to offered favorable views of Islam or of Muslims.
In regards to the primary allegation of the blog entry, is the absence of search suggestions an act of censorship or is it a reflection of Google sending back suggestions based upon other searches?
And even if the undocumented allegations in the blog entry are accurate, so what? Google is a business. If one doesn't like the way a business is run or the products it offers, one is free to find alternatives.
Or one can do what Ms. Geller did: post a blog entry about being a victim of a corporation's cowardly refusal to participate in her campaign of self promotion. Amazingly, one gets zero suggestions for "Pamela Geller is".
Source is
here.
Quote:
Newly asked questions
What content does Google censor outside China?
Outside China, Google blocks only websites with child abuse images and certain values from its search of ranges of numbers.
The latter restriction, according to Google's worldwide policy counsel Andrew McLaughlin, tackles identity thieves using the search engine to trawl the web for credit card and government identification numbers, such as US social security numbers. It is still possible to search for individual numbers within these ranges, so owners can check these are not online.
"Beyond that, we don't do affirmative policing," McLaughlin told an Oxford University seminar earlier this month. "That's for legal, and just value, reasons."
However, localised Google services abide by the law of the relevant country. McLaughlin described a legally-enforced, secret blacklist run by Germany's BPjM, the country's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons, as "troublingly free of the kind of checks and balances you would expect". Google.de complies, albeit with an announcement when links have been blocked.
But although Google redirects users in Germany to Google.de through "geotargeting" (identifying your location from your internet address), it does not stop them switching to the uncensored Google.com; the link is on the front page (www.google.com/ncr).
Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, described this as a "gossamer-thin fig leaf" of compliance with national regulation. "The more optimistic way to characterise what's going on is that governments recognise there are limits to their jurisdiction," McLaughlin replied, adding that geotargeting is easy to get around through anonymous web-use services.
Of China, where users cannot avoid the nationally censored version, McLaughlin said the company had decided some Google was better than none for the Chinese. "We think we're making an empirically justifiable calculation," he said. "It is a contestable argument."
He said that Google.com and Blogger are "the most free-speech parts of our offering", but that Google Earth had not used new images of Beirut showing bomb damage from Israel's conflict with Hizbullah last summer. McLaughlin said that doing so could have convinced governments, some of which control aerial imagery of their country, to insist on pre-publication checks, although the US and UK have taken a relaxed attitude.
"So far, we haven't degraded or blurred an image at the requirement of any government," McLaughlin said of Google Earth, adding: "I don't know how much longer that will be true."
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