i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

NPR recently featured a story on religiously-specific search engines. These search engines filter all results based on specific religious beliefs. There are currently separate search engines for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Besides the controversy over it being considered censorship, these search engines raise questions on how the returned results are being selected; particularly who is doing the filtering and what criteria is being used. It would be interesting to find out what methods the search engines are using for constraints and how precise they are. If searching for 'sex' only returns results with the Islamic view, how granular is the definition of that view, and what personal biases affect that view? The fact that 'sexuality' returned no results shows that the intention isn't to completely discard certain subjects from their reality, but it does make you wonder who is determining what is appropriate for an entire religion. 

The article also states that the search engine for Muslims already has 10 million users within the first year. It would seem logical to assume that there are a spectrum of varying beliefs within the millions of users. Depending on how restrictive the search results are, there is the potential of excluding results that fit one person's beliefs but align with another's. I wonder if these users come to this site trusting that what they're searching for will not be excluded from the results? It would be interesting to see how many of the users solely use these religious search engines versus how many use it in addition to a general one, and specifically how they are using each one.