Jew Watch - Google Controversy

Google Controversy

The increasing publicity has resulted in many news sources, weblogs, and general information sites to link to Jew Watch, and thus created a Google bomb. In May 2004, Steven Weinstock launched an online petition to remove Jew Watch from Google. "When performing a search for the word 'Jew' on Google, the first Web site listed is JewWatch.com, a site that has been notorious for being anti-Semitic," Weinstock wrote in a widely disseminated e-mail. He set up an online petition site called RemoveJewWatch.com. By mid-2004 the site had collected over 125,000 signatures.

In response to complaints, including one from the Anti-Defamation League, Google added an explanation to searches for the site. They said their results are automatically ranked by computer algorithms, and that they do not approve of any of the results.

In December 2004, OSCE's Sandy Starr addressed the issues of freedom of speech:

When it transpired that the anti-Semitic website Jew Watch ranked highest in the search engine Google’s results for the search term “Jew”, a Remove Jew Watch campaign was established, to demand that Google remove the offending website from its listings. Fortunately for the principle of free speech, Google did not capitulate to this particular demand... Forced to act on its own initiative, Remove Jew Watch successfully used Googlebombing... Better still would have been either a proper contest of ideas between Jew Watch and Remove Jew Watch, or alternatively a decision that Jew Watch was beneath contempt and should simply be ignored. Not every crank and extremist warrants attention, even if they do occasionally manage to spoof search engine rankings.

Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui wrote in 2008 that the Wikipedia page on Jews had become the number one result for the search word "Jew". Jew Watch's position continues to fluctuate in search results: during early 2009, the site dropped below the top 50 positions for the search term "Jew" on Google.