Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

scienceblogs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 103 posts

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#41

Post by artsrc »

yters wrote: post #28
gort wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't exactly offend me; I just find it interesting and potentially troubling. It's part of a trend of going out of the way to avoid offending Muslims specifically. I fear that things like Ireland's new blasphemy law, which came into force a few days ago, are the result of this trend. (Of course, it applies to mockery of all religions; in the West at least one can hardly get a law passed outlawing just mockery o…

If we only respect religions that cut off our heads, eventually those will be the religions that rule us.

My reaction to this is that people who are easily offended must have some insecurity. Where this insecurity is not justified, it reduces my respect.

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#42

Post by jrnkntl »

gort wrote: post #40
jrnkntl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok ok, even muslism is then.

Eh? My point was that you wouldn't necessarily expect them to have thought of it. They certainly won't have thought of this bizarre misspelling.

Fair enough, I am unfamiliar with the misspellings. Musli(s)m sounds perfectly normal to me as a non-native speaker of the English language, and for a bunch of other people on the internet for that matter hence the suggestions of google.

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#44

Post by DrJokepu »

ams6110 wrote: post #20
viggity wrote: post #12

So much for letting the algorithms rule their results. They could at least be somewhat equal about it and do the same thing about christianity and judaism, but then again, they know that nobody is going to chop someone's head off when they see that the first result for "christianity is" is "christianity is bullshit ". How long is the civilized world going submit to this insanity? When is enough, enough?

Let's hope someone at Google is reading this and gets this fixed PRONTO. It is grounds for boycotting the service IMHO.

Huh? Since when common sense, avoiding trouble and trying not to offend socially sensitive groups count as 'grounds for boycotting'?

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#45

Post by gort »

artsrc wrote: post #41
yters wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we only respect religions that cut off our heads, eventually those will be the religions that rule us.

My reaction to this is that people who are easily offended must have some insecurity. Where this insecurity is not justified, it reduces my respect.

To be fair, religious affiliation seems unusually tightly bound to some people's sense of who they are. What's unclear to me is why certain religions have this worse than others, e.g. compare Muslim reaction to the Muhammad cartoons with Christian reaction to "Jerry Springer: The Opera".

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#46

Post by joubert »

krakensden wrote: post #5

Everyone knows exactly why they don't make search recommendations, and is there really anything we can say about it that won't devolve into trolling, flaming, and deliberate misunderstanding?

Possibly the starting "Is" in Islam throws the googleboxen into a self-recursive Gödel gyroscope.

For example, if you try with related phrases such as "Muslim is" it works. So my guess would be algorithm breakdown because of "is" repeat.

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#47

Post by miguelpais »

This is rather disturbing. I didn't live through a dictatorial government in my country, but 30 years or so one that was ruling for about 50 years was put down. The worst thing about a dictatorship is not the censorship itself that will cut the parts that they don't want to be read from a text or a poem, it is when the author himself limits its expressiveness and freewill to the walls built by the fear of the censorship, and will instead write the version of his feelings that he thinks it will not get cut.

Google is doing the same... actively self-censoring, the worst form of censorship.

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#48

Post by joubert »

joubert wrote: post #46
krakensden wrote: post #5

Everyone knows exactly why they don't make search recommendations, and is there really anything we can say about it that won't devolve into trolling, flaming, and deliberate misunderstanding?

Possibly the starting "Is" in Islam throws the googleboxen into a self-recursive Gödel gyroscope. For example, if you try with related phrases such as "Muslim is" it works. So my guess would be algorithm breakdown because of "is" repeat.

Actually, I tried a few other examples using "minorities" as the start of the phrase and then using "are". They are all censored. Non-minorities aren't; e.g. "men are" works fine.

So my algorithm implosion theory is clearly wrong.

Re: Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"

#49

Post by kwamenum86 »

joubert wrote: post #46
krakensden wrote: post #5

Everyone knows exactly why they don't make search recommendations, and is there really anything we can say about it that won't devolve into trolling, flaming, and deliberate misunderstanding?

Possibly the starting "Is" in Islam throws the googleboxen into a self-recursive Gödel gyroscope. For example, if you try with related phrases such as "Muslim is" it works. So my guess would be algorithm breakdown because of "is" repeat.

Not so...try "Isaac is "
Post reply on HN