Google Explains Jew Results

Google has replied to the petition to remove JewWatch.com from its search engine. No surprise that they won't remove the site, but their reply is more than a standard form letter and offers some interesting, though not entirely persuasive thoughts, on why anti-Semitic results appear.

f you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

* http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
* http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

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.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

I applaud Google's interest in ordinary language philosophy, i.e., the different motives for the use of "Jew" as distinct from "Jewish" or "Judaism." However suggestive their hypotheses, they are not entirely satisfying. First, most of the sites that appear when people use "Jew" are not "disturbing," including what is now the second-ranked site, the Wikipedia entry, which used to be first until this controversy appeared to bump up the JewWatch.com ranking to #1. Also, Google makes an uncharacteristically inaccurate statement about its own search engine: if you type in "Jews" and not "Jew," JewWatch.com also appears as the second site on the list (after the Wikipedia entry) and the third url on the list is for Jews for Jesus. And finally, as I pointed out yesterday, the explanation does not explain why similar results do not show up when people enter "Christian" or "Muslim."

While the details of Google's response are not entirely accurate, the spirit of its engagement is a welcome change from corporate double-speak that ignores the substantive issues. Their engagement, if not expertise in linguistics and counting (the results in their own search engine), are much appreciated.

Website Banning Petition in Progress

A few hours ago my girlfriend received a note forwarded from her mother's friend, asking her to sign a petition to remove "JewWatch.com" from the Google search engine. The note tells people, correctly, that JewWatch.com comes up very high on the google.com search engine if you type "jew." It was the second entry, after the Wikipedia entry. (A website has a high ranking on the google pages if a lot of people visit it through the google keyword searches or if a lot of other sites link to it, which the google engine can figure out by crawling through the web and finding the urls on other pages.)

The message says the site is anti-Semitic and tells recipients that if 500,000 people sign a petition requesting its removal from the search engine, Google will oblige. (The petition itself states Google will do this with a mere 50,000 signatures.)

I find it hard to believe that Google will in fact remove a site from its search regardless of the number of people who request this. If it does, this is a well-kept secret in the normally transparent Google operation, as its not mentioned in any of the means for removing site content. Hard to prove a negative, so I have a query into the Google Press Center about this.

The emailed message does raise an interesting question, and it's not about whether google should remove the site. (Of course not. That's a no-brainer for anyone who doesn't want their viewing habits controlled by the preferences of 50,000 or 500,000 people with too much time on their hands, though not enough time to realize that their messages are going to send people to the JewWatch.com site and further bolster its ranking.)

The intriguing question is why would JewWatch.com be the second site listed when "jew" is entered? Moreover, what does it mean that other entries on the first google page for "jew" are actually much more pernicious than JewWatch, including "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem," a 1920 anti-Semitic screed by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford car company. That site also includes links to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other creepy sites.

I tried typing in "Christian," "Muslim" to see if something similar occurred, but it didn't. One reason is probably that Christians comprise 33% of the world's population and about 20% are Muslim. Jews are fewer than one half of one per cent of the world's population. Assuming that people who are members of a group are more favorably disposed to that group than those who are not, chances are that in absolute numbers, a lot more people are not-Jews than not-Christian or not-Muslim. If ten percent of Jews are not favorably disposed to Muslims and Christians, that's about 138,000 potential anti-Muslim or anti-Muslim website viewers. If 10 percent of Muslims (120 million) and 10 percent of Christians (198 million) hate Jews, that's 318 million people, more than enough for a robust Google ranking.

The sites that appear if you type "jew" are not just anti-Zionist or "anti-Israel Lobby" sites, to use the less charged language of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. These are sites that denounce people as Jews, and not just those who favor Israel.

The obvious reason for the sites' popularity is that a ton of people fear and hate Jews. However this is not a reason but another question. Why? What's going on with the hypothetical ten percent driving these rankings, people markedly singling out Jews and not other minority groups for international approbation? While it's true that hatred is more likely toward a religion other than one's own, the first pages of Google hits for "Confucian" or "Zoroastrians"--religions with fewer adherents than Judaism--display no links to hate-filled websites.

I don't think the answer is the one that B'nai B'rith has in mind but rather, that it lies in Israel's own policies that conflate Jewishness with Israeliness and hence encourage those who oppose Israel to oppose Jews. When I was living in Istanbul and a Turkish sect supporting Al Qaeda blew up nearby synagogues in 2003 and killed 29 Jewish Turks while they were worshiping, Israel arrived to assist with the removal of corpses and the investigation. Much to the country's dismay, the bodies were buried with Israeli and not Turkish flags. Perhaps this was the decision of the families, or of the Turkish government to show their solidarity and appreciation of Israeli aid. But this decision to collapse dying for being Jewish with the celebration of Israel was not made by the folks running JewWatch or other anti-Semitic sites.

Indeed Israel puts itself forward as a Jewish state. It allows anyone who can prove Jewish descent to become a citizen and denies this to anyone not already in its borders, including those who have been removed by force. It is therefore not all that surprising that Jews and not just the Israel lobby would be held responsible for the crimes committed by and in the name of Israel. Indeed to do otherwise, which has been demanded of outsiders since Israel's founding, is to expect a high if not absurd level of sophistication. During World War Two the United States government interned its own citizens if they happened to be Japanese. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt, married to a great civil rights leader, could conflate nationality with ethnicity, then it seems unsurprising that folks with far less cosmopolitan aspirations would do the same.

This does not mean that FDR was correct in assessing the loyalty of his citizens. The confusion reflects that nationality creates ethnicity: Ireland makes possible "the Irish," Korea "the Koreans," and so forth. Before Judaism was Judaism, the Israelites were a nation, one that God told Abraham he would choose for covenant. (Jews were named such much later, by the Romans after the largest tribe in Judea.) Yes, anti-Semitism existed before the modern state of Israel. Long before that. But it did not exist before Israel the patrilineal nation of descent, the one following from the lineage of Abraham before becoming matrilineal after the destruction of the Second Temple. In both cases, belonging to the Jewish or Israeli nation is largely a matter of descent and kinship, just like all other nations, a mark of belonging and therefore of exclusion as well.

If Jews want to stop being targeted in the fight against Israel, then Israel needs to forsake its status as a Jewish nation, and join all other countries in opening their borders. The best way to make sure JewWatch goes away, is to remove the Muslim Watch at the Israeli borders.

The Political Science of Love and Hate

That's the title of the paper I'm about to give at the American Political Science meetings in Chicago. Leaving for the airport shortly but if you're interested in my day job, here you go: "The Political Science of Love and Hate."