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google's gormless geeks are full of it.

This from Wall Street Journal and nyt

<< In Search of Anti-Semitism

The Google search engine has been involved in a bit of a controversy of late. It seems that when you use Google to search the Web for the word Jew, the first site that came up was a vile anti-Semitic outfit called Jew Watch. (Earlier this afternoon, Jew Watch had fallen to second, after the entry for Jew in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, but as we write, the two pages have switched places again. We're not providing a link to the offending site, because doing so would actually increase the likelihood of Jew Watch regaining the top spot.)

As the New York Times notes, "a Web site calling itself "Remove JewWatch.com from the Google search engine!" is circulating a petition asking Google to remove the site from its listings." No dice, says Google; "it trusts its automated program to rank Web sites accurately."

We hadn't written about this up until now, because although we sympathized with the RemoveJewWatch folks, we found Google's defense plausible. Until, that is, we learned this from the New York Times:

Until February 2003, a user searching for a guide to the English city of Chester would have been presented with "Chester's guide to molesting young girls" as the second entry. After officials from Chester complained, Google removed the site.

There does seem to be something amiss with Google's priorities when the complaints of Jews objecting to anti-Semitism carry less weight than those of "officials from Chester." >>