Google’s auto suggestion on religions and the fix

http://probebusiness.blogspot.com/

#Googlefail! The term was the most discussed in Twitter on 14th of May 2009. This
happened when Google’s web mail services were on an outage for around 3 hours in
the day.Users of Gmail were found flocking on to Twitter to discuss the #Googlefail
issue. The outage was a setback for Google. The reliability on Google’s much hyped
cloud computing strategy was questioned. Not only that, since then in Twitter
#Googlefail has became a common discussion topic to discuss the failures, flaws and
a range of issues with all the applications of Google.

From the past few days #Googlefail is in the news for its autosuggestion on religions
in Google search.

Typing ‘Christianity is’, ‘Buddhism is’ or ‘Hinduism is’ generates a number of

suggestions that doesn’t go well with the respective religions. Even typing ‘Atheism
is’ results in similar suggestions. However typing ‘Islam is’ doesn’t produce any
suggestions. Typing ‘Muslim is’ does generate some suggestions though.
Google suggest, generates suggestions through a variety of algorithms (algorithms yet
unknown) by analyzing the phrases most frequently entered by users and by using
other parameters. It's usually expected that the algorithms should work similarly in
all the scenarios, but the algorithms working differently only in the case of ‘Islam is’
suggests that there's more to algorithms that has gone into Google search's auto
suggestions. Google has now been accused of being involved in selective censorship.
This brings up questions on Google’s fairness in treating all the faiths. This is a
‘Google fail’ considering that Google hasn’t been fair in the treatment of all the faiths.

Google has however denied this failure by saying that the ‘absence of autosuggestion
in case of Islam is due to a Software problem and it is working to fix it’. It’s been
more than a week since Google made this statement and still there has been no fix.

By admitting that Google still has bugs in its software and even after taking a week,
Google not being able to fix the software, it has shown that there are serious problems
with its software operations which is a 'Google fail'.

In this incident Google is in a fix. Whether it is the case selective censorship or it is

the case of software problems, there is certainly a #Googlefail anyway.

[ The complete article is also available at

http://probebusiness.blogspot.com/2010/01/googlefail-googles-autosuggestion-
fix.html ]