Religion and Objectivity Collide in Google Searches

Elissa Lerner: Among the myriad of tweets and news posts in the last 48 hours over the new iPad and President Obama’s State of the Union address, Mashable managed to spot an update on Google that would likely otherwise escape the average Internet user. Samuel Axon writes that previously, a search for “Islam is” would not yield any results in Google’s auto-complete search term box. However, results based on popular user searches now pop up just like they do for any other religion. Other religion searches generate positive and negative search suggestions, such as “Hinduism is the oldest religion”/”Hinduism is fake” and “Christianity is a lie” (all of the Christianity auto-fill results seem to be negative at the moment). Happily, now Islam can join the party. Although there has been speculation that Google censored such auto-complete results to prevent offending anyone over extremely harsh searches, Google stated that this was just a glitch in the system. Perhaps auto-fill speaks louder than words.