Google accused of being anti-semitic

That's according to Cnet, in this article.

It all started when Steven Weinstock, a New York real estate investor and former yeshiva student, did a Google search on "Jew".

The first site he got was Jew Watch, which looks at alleged Jewish conspiracies, Nazi literature and other anti-Semitic topics, under headings such as "Jewish Controlled Press" and "Hitler on the Jews”

Weinstock has launched an online petition asking Google to remove the site from its index.

"The fact that the first search result would yield an anti-Semitic site is all too common in a growing era of increased anti-Semitism," Weinstock wrote in his introduction to the petition.

However Google denied that its search engine was stacked in favour of anti-Jewish groups. A spokesman told Cnet that the search results are determined by a complex set of algorithms that measure factors such as how many sites link to a given page.

"Google's search results are solely determined by computer algorithms that essentially reflect the popular opinion of the Web… Our search results are not manipulated by hand. We're not able to make any manual changes to the results."

According to Google the reason for the site being ranked so highly is because the word "Jew" is less common in mainstream society and has been replaced by less culturally loaded words. Tap in words like Jewish, or Jewish people will all get you pro-Jewish sites. µ