i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google realizes that its search algorithm is far from perfect. It seems that even the "politically incorrect" opinions could be able to show up in the first places out of Google control. If you search for words such as "jew" or "obama" you may find disturbing results and images. However, Google is showing up a disclaimer when someone search for such words. Google says:

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page. 

In our "bias in search" discussion yesterday, we commented about the inability of a low-power opinion or a disenting trend to appear in the first results. It seems, however, that there are still some ways to game the system if an enormous group of people wants to express a different opinion.

If you want to read AFP's note, you can check out this link (in a google hosted site, by the way).

Note: Bold format is my addition