CNN is reporting that Google is not changing anything until it gets an official order from the court.

“The common denominator on these sites is the incitement of hate and the call to violence,” DAIA is quoted as saying. “In none of these cases are there discussions or criticisms from the academic, technological, political or philosophical perspectives.”

Google says:

“If you recently used Google to search for the word ‘Jew,’ you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

…

“Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.”

According to CNN’s report, Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America. A report from comScore came out earlier this week looking at Google’s search market share in Latin America. Of the six markets the firm measured, Argentina had the lowest percentage of Google users at 89.4% (still pretty high).

This is certainly not the first time Google’s search suggestions have generated some controversy. One example that comes to mind was about a year and a half ago when Alex Wilhelm at TheNextWeb discovered an interesting behavior in Google Suggest involving religion. With most major religions, you would get suggestions from Google when you typed queries like “christianity is” or “judaism is”. Google was not, however, showing any suggestions for “Islam is”.

Not long after the story made the rounds, Google started showing suggestions for the query. The top suggestions were then “islam is bullshit,” “islam is false,” “islam is not a religion,” and “islam is a lie”.

Testing it today, the top one is “islam is” followed by “islam is evil”.

Testing the query “jew” from here, I am seeing “jewish,” “jewel,” and “jewish hospital”. It’s worth noting that suggestions (at least here in the U.S.) take location into account too.

Have you considered deleting your Facebook profile? Let us know.

Matt Cutts and other Googlers de-activated their accounts soon after the Open Graph initiative was announced. Remember, you don’t have to delete the account to de-activate it. Facebook makes it very easy to stay. In fact, if you go to delete your account, they will try to guilt you into staying by telling you which of your friends will miss you.

There are apparently (as Danny Sullivan points out) so many people searching for how to delete their accounts, Google is even offering the suggestion "How do I delete my Facebook account?" as a suggestion for a query begining ‘how do I":

It would be interesting to know how many people that are figuring out how to delete their profiles are actually going through with it. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, for example, just stood on the "edge of the cliff" before backtracking (though I don’t think he intended to go through with it).

Google Insights for Search data shows a pretty big upswing in Facebook account deletion interest over the last year or two (hat tip: Huffington Post):

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur posted the following video talking about why it’s probalby not the greatest idea to delete your Facebook account:

Loic makes a pretty good point about Facebook’s usefulness as a source of public data, and about how you should basically consider everything you do online to be public, if privacy is your concern. As he notes, even emails can be forwarded.

Still if you choose to stick with Facebook, knowing your privacy settings is a good idea. The New York Times has an interesting diagram of what it calls a "bewildering tangle of options" for managing privacy on Facebook. "To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options," the publication says.

It will be very interesting to see if a significant amount of people drop Facebook, but at this point, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. One guy recently started an initiative to get people to join him in leaving Facebook. It’s not working out so well so far. Josh Levy pledged, "I will delete my Facebook account but only if 10,000 other Facebook users will do the same." The deadline is May 31st. So far he has 76 people.

This isn’t like when people started abandoning their MySpace accounts for Facebook. There’s no service here drawing people away. People have a lot invested in their Facebook accounts at this point, and as Facebook becomes integrated more and more into the fabric of the web and popular culture as a whole, many will find it hard to walk away even if they have considered it. Then of course there are the many, many people who simply love Facebook.

Do you think it’s a wise decision to abandon Facebook as it becomes a greater part of the web? Share your thoughts.

Universal search features met Google Suggest on the desktop in December, and although not revolutionary, they’re useful.  It’s thanks to them that you can see a five-day forecast after just typing "weather," or see the results of a zip code query or currency conversion without going near the "enter" key.

Now the same sort of stuff (including stock quotes, time zone info, and flight data in addition those other universal suggestions) is available to people who are on the go.

It’s available to lots and lots of people who are on the go, too, considering that Google’s supporting Android devices, iPhones, iPods, and Palm WebOS devices in America.

This may help Google become more popular than ever in the U.S. mobile market; it probably won’t take people long to realize that the second or two that’ll be saved per search will add up over time.

Original Article: Every now and then, someone spots an oddity in Google’s suggestions. Some are funny. Some are disturbing, and some are just weird. Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web has discovered an interesting behavior in Google Suggest involving religion.

With most major religions, you will get suggestions from Google when you type in a query like "example is". If you type "christianity is", or "judaism is" you will get suggestions (which some will no doubt find controversial in themselves), but when you type "islam is", you get nothing.

Here are a few screenshots for different examples of such queries:

To be fair, there are other religions that don’t yield suggestions, but all of the biggest ones besides Islam do.

The phenomenon has raised a few eyebrows. Wilhem himself says, "Google is systematically blocking, it seems, all search suggestions for Islam. Why? To remove the chance of an adherent of the faith from being offended by a perhaps severe search suggestion? Why not treat all search terms equally?"

He thinks that either "A: Google is horribly broken and this is evidence of that or B: They seem to be tampering with results."

Danny Sullivan, one of the most influential voices in the search industry weighed in on the conversation, saying, "Google is horribly broken. That’s my call. And they do such a piss poor job explaining why these types of things happen (sometimes not even trying at all) that it’s easier to believe B, that they’re tampering with search suggestions."

He points to a piece he wrote about Google Suggest and Climategate, "Many people are convinced that Google messed with the suggestions for that," says Sullivan. "Google was adamant they did not. I still believe they didn’t. I also can only tell you from covering Google over the years that things like this are far more likely to be because they are indeed screw ups than that they are intentionally aiming to do so."

A query for "islam is" returns about 3,140,000 results. Others have pointed out that there are no suggestions for queries like "Larry Page is" or "Sergey Brin is", although Sullivan is careful to point out that there are plenty for "Google is," and they’re not all the most positive things in the world.

What do you make of Google’s suggestions or lack thereof? Share your thoughts here.

Original Article: Google’s "suggest" feature can be quite useful. It can save you time when typing your query if you happen to be searching for something that a lot of others have searched for before you. The feature is even useful for Google itself, because a while back, they began incorporating ads into it.

Google Suggest has some problems though. This is nothing new. People have discovered some strange suggestions from time to time. One that has been discussed around the web frequently this year for example, is Google’s suggestion of "Why wont my parakeet eat my diarrhea" when a user begins a query with "why won’t". This one has even repeatedly made it onto the Google Hot Trends list.

That one was kind of funny (if that’s your sense of humor), but Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable is pointing to a more disturbing set of suggestions from the search engine. When a user begins a query with "little kids," the very first suggestion is "little kids having sexs". Among the other suggestions on the list are "little kids dancing nasty," and "little kids grinding."

Schwartz  also pointed to another suggestion from Google saying "I am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People" that a user is presented with when beginning a query with "I am".

Schwartz notes that Google’s suggestions are purely algorithmic. It’s not as though Google’s staff is actually encouraging searches like these, but the suggestions do highlight the need for some adjustments and/or human intervention.

In the case of the "little kids" suggestions, Schwartz says a Google employee responded to his report by saying, "Thanks for reporting this to me — I’ll take a look." However, at the time of this writing, each of the aforementioned suggestions are still in place.

Have you seen other inappropriate or otherwise odd suggestions from Google Suggest? Share in the comments.
 

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Universal search in Google Suggest means that if you begin typing a query, not only will Google give you suggested text to help you complete your search, but they may even give you some of the other universal search information you’re used to seeing in search results. One example would be weather results for specific locations:

"This kind of information will appear in Suggest either above or below the suggested search terms for a variety of queries," Google says. "For example, you can type ‘delta 140′ to see the flight status. You can also quickly discover the current time, figure out how many Euros you’ll get per dollar, or even brush up on metric conversions. In total, there are currently 10 universal search features available in Google Suggest: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions — and we plan to add additional features in the future."

As Google continues to add additional features to Universal Search in Google Suggest, let’s hope that they are able to better control those than they have been with Google Suggest in general, particularly if they add images to it. Google began adding ads to Google Suggest earlier this year.

The Quick Scroll Chrome extension lets users use Google’s search capabilities after leaving our results page. After a user clicks a result the extension scrolls right to the relevant content. A small black box appears in the lower right hand corner of the browser with a couple snippets of text from the page that might be relevant to your query.

The extension works kind of like your web browser’s "find" feature, but it isn’t limited to exact words like that. It appears to use Google’s algorithm for determining relevance.

"Like Google Search, Quick Scroll analyzes things like proximity, prominence and position of the words to identify the most relevant content," the company says. "You can think of it like a personal assistant who reads webpages before you do and highlights the parts you might want to read. If several sections of the page have useful content, Quick Scroll will show you multiple text excerpts from different portions of the page and you can click on any of them to scroll to that spot."

Quick Scroll doesn’t appear for all results. It only shows up if Google doesn’t detect that the entire page is relevant to your query, and there is actually a need to scroll to a specific section.
 

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"The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of," says Google. "The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you’re looking for as quickly as possible."

Google brought Google Suggest to Google.com last year. Earlier this year in went worldwide. Google even began placing ads within the suggestions. This was one feature introduced a few months ago along with some navigational suggestions, personalized suggestions, and suggestions on results pages.

It is unclear how many of these features will be present in the Google News version of Google Suggest, but it is interesting that Google refers to these suggestions as being "real time." This is not exactly the real-time search that we are familiar with, as those offered by Twitter, Facebook, and others, but the Google News suggestions seem to indicate that they are reflections of timely news searches.

It does a reasonably good job at this. When starting to type a query for "Ted," I was expecting Ted Kennedy to come up first (ideally), but Teddy Bruschi came up first, and since he just announced his retirement, it appears to have exceeded my expectations in that regard.Typing "Sk" at the moment brings up "Skype" as the first result. The eBay-Skype deal was just announced, so it seems to be working pretty well. 

The first new feature gives you suggestions on the results page. Before, they only showed suggestions based on the original search input. Now, when you search from a SERP, you will get suggestions related to that SERP. So if you are on a results page for roller coasters (as in the example below) and you begin typing in the search box, the first few suggestions will be roller coaster-related.

The second new feature gives you personalized suggestions. "We estimate that about a quarter of all signed-in searches are repeats from the past month," explains a post from Google. "Now, if you’re signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, we may show some of your relevant past searches as you type." If you don’t like a particular suggestion, you can simply click a "remove" button and you won’t see it next time.

The third feature gives you navigational suggestions. If your first keystrokes indicate you’re looking for a specific site, Google will suggest that site.

Finally, the last feature gives you sponsored links in suggestions. "Sometimes we detect that the most relevant completion for what you’re typing is an ad," Google explains. "When an ad is shown, we mark it with the text ‘sponsored Link’ and a colored background, as on the results page."

They’ve even found a way to stick ads in the search box. That’s impressive.

In addition to these new features, they will no longer show the result count for items in the suggest box, and the text of suggestions will now be bolded. Features are rolling out gradually, so if you do not have them yet, be patient.

Yes, if you type "superc" into the main search box of Google UK, Google Ireland, Google India, or a number of other localized versions, you’ll see the full Mary Poppins word given as a suggestion.  On the Official Google Blog, David Kadouch explained, "Google Suggest now covers 155 domains in 51 languages."

But the really neat part is this: "We’ve localized our suggestions to account for various cultural and local factors to offer suggestions that look familiar to our users."

So if, for example, you type "liver" into the Google.com interface, you’ll see recommendations related to various health issues.  But try it with Google UK interface, and the suggestions lean towards the city in England and the Liverpool Football Club.

You can test Google Australia with "kangaroo" and Google Ireland with "pubs," too, if you please.

Although Google Suggest wasn’t too impressive when it first came out, this is a fairly interesting turn of events.

Suppose you’re going to search for [new york times], for example.  While normal users are supposed to start typing the query, pick one of Google Suggest’s recommendations, look at the results page, and then click on something, certain testers are just seeing Google Suggest provide a link to the New York Times site.

 

According to Danny Sullivan, other queries are eliciting links to news stories.  Both of these options could allow even neat freaks and fast typists to see Google Suggest as more than a page-clutterer and distraction.

Then there’s the detail that’ll be of interest to advertisers: sponsored links are sometimes showing up, too.  Sullivan writes, "I’m somewhat concerned about the ads appearing at the top of the list.  For one thing, I think it’s way too easy for people to click on an ad to reach a web site where Google should be sending them to for free . . . .  Fortunately, Google said it’s also testing an implementation where the ads appear at the bottom of the list."

Given how hard Google is trying to tap into new revenue sources, don’t be surprised if at least some of these ideas become mainstream in the near future.