Googling for a Better Tomorrow

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, April 23, 2004

Fifty-six years later, the war continues – and, in a sense, intensifies.

Israel tends to evoke strong reactions – you either love us or you hate us. Unfortunately, we know all too much about those who would rather see us disappear. But we do have our fans in the outside world, like the guys at http://www.jhm.org/support-israel.asp, a religious Christian website that lists reasons devout Christians should support Israel. And, as it turns out, there are even some Muslims out there who like us (http://www.sarahn.com/israel.html).

But it seems as if there are a lot more people out there who have an anti-Israel and anti-Jewish chip on their shoulder. After the Holocaust and the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees made their way to Israel, and over the past few decades, all of us, new immigrant and old, have pitched in to try and make it work. I think most of us would agree that we’ve done a pretty good job!

Fifty-six years is a long time, and you would think that “they” would have come to terms with us by now, but it hasn’t happened yet. Terrorist attacks, anti-Semitism in the Arab media, and refusal to even recognize Israel’s right to exist is just the way it is, at least for now.

Unfortunately, though, the “cold war” against Israel – and the Jews - has definitely intensified with the rise of the World Wide Web. Propaganda that was once distributed in print is now spread electronically, a far more efficient method of distribution. There are more than enough anti-Jewish Web sites out there that prove this. Just taking a tour of some of the garbage out on the Web makes me feel that I did the right thing by moving to Israel. Imagine having to live on the same street or even in the same city as some of the bums who author or contribute to these sites!

That cyberspace is rife with anti-Semites can be proven by a little experiment, one you may have seen discussed in a popular e-mail that’s been making the rounds recently. It seems that when you type the word “Jew” into the popular Google (http://www.google.com) search engine, a vilely anti-Jewish Web site tops the list of search results.

Now that just isn’t right; what if some fellow out in Wyoming (not that there aren’t Jews in Wyoming) or China (ditto) who had heard about the Jews but didn’t know too much about them decided to check the Jews out by doing a Web search for information about them. It’s eminently feasible that he would open up Google and search for the term.

And the first site that would come up would be a site that tells him just how awful this group is, how they are responsible for all the world’s ills, how they bake their Matzoh using Gentile babies’ blood, etc. When the Google search scandal first broke, many people appealed to the search engine’s directors to remove the link between the bad site and the term “Jew,” and an on-line petition was set up (http://www.petitiononline.com/rjw23/petition.html) to garner what was rumored to be a minimum of 50,000 signatures Google needed before it could act on the case (over 100,000 have signed already).

But alas, it wasn’t a matter of signatures and petitions. Although Google does remove anti-Semitic links from its page ranks in its European search engines, because those sites are illegal, google.com is an American site, and America does not have any laws against such sites. Try “Jew” on http://www.google.fr - say what you want about the French, but the anti-Jewish site is not on the results page, because of French law. Ditto for Germany, ironically. Google has what to say on this subject at http://www.google.com/explanation.html, but the site says quite clearly “Because of our objective and automated ranking system, Google cannot be influenced by these petitions.” In other words, the site stays.

So just how does a virulently anti-Jewish site become the top answer to a web query about Jew? Well, it has to do with Google’s method of page ranking. According to the company (http://www.google.com/press/overview_tech.html), the main criteria in their method of ranking has to do with the number of other Web pages that link to a site: “

Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a "vote" by Page A for Page B. Google assesses a page's importance by the votes it receives.” In other words, the more people link to a page, the more important that page is. Which means that more pages link to the anti-Semitic page than to, for example, Judaism 101 (www.jewfaq.org).

So that means that more Web sites out there hate Jews than like them, right? Not necessarily; there is a little trick at play here called “Google Bombing,” which entails purposely providing links to certain pages in order to bolster their popularity. Businesses do this all the time to increase their Google ranking; the closer a web site is to the top of the first page of Google results in a query, the more likely it is to get clicked on. There are many Web sites out there that contain very little information – just links to another site. Often, a business will buy up domain names just so they can link those pages to their “master site.” The more sites with reference links to the master site, the higher that master site will appear in the rankings.

The technique was first described in an article in 2001 at this site (http://uber.nu/2001/04/06), and is explained nicely here (http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googlebombs.htm). Since then, numerous examples have emerged, including “googling” (now an official verb!) a search for “miserable failure,” which brings up a biography of President Bush as the first link (Jimmy Carter is second, though). It appears as if the high ranking of this anti-Jewish site is organized campaign by Jew haters to push their agenda into Google.

Well, two can play at that game, and there is now a campaign to counter-bomb Google with a kinder, gentler site that can serve as the main “Jew” search result. A referral link campaign was organized by Jewschool (http://www.jewschool.com/) and was quickly adopted by authors of Jewish web sites and blogs all around the world. The more sites link to a pro-Jewish site, the higher that site will rank in the overall Google results.

The Jewschool campaign decided to focus on the Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia entry for “Jew” as the focus of the ranking campaign. The Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew) is a lot more user-friendly, and basically discusses Judaism from an objective, factual point of view – just the thing for our friends in Wyoming and China. Jewschool’s objective is to load as many pages with this link as possible, and instructions at the site are quite simple: If you have a web page or blog, simply insert the following somewhere onto your page -

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew" target="_new">Jew</a>

- and when the Google search spider comes around, it will pick up the link, register it in the page ranking database, and push the page higher up on the list.

Apparently, the gambit worked for awhile, because I saw many postings that indicated that the anti-Semitic site had dropped from the top slot. As of yesterday, though, it seemed to be back on top, unfortunately. But I did have a great deal of trouble getting into the site – maybe somebody is trying to hack them (hint to all your hackers out there)!

Unfortunately, this site is not the only offensive one – four out of the top ten results for the “Jew” search return anti-Semitic or Christian missionary sites (“Muslim,” “Christian,” and “Hindu” do not have this problem). And I haven’t even mentioned what comes up when you type “Jews” into Google, or what happens when you do a search for “Jew” at the Google picture site (if you don’t want to be sick don’t even try). At least for the “Israel” search, the good old Jerusalem Post comes up first – and “Jewish” and “Judaism” seem to be OK, too.

If you never had a Web page before or have thought about putting together a blog (web log) but never got around to it, right now, before Yom Haatzmaut, might be the right time (check out www.blogger.com for info). Remember, we’re all in this fight together – and that includes our PCs!

Send questions/comments to ds@newzgeek.com