Google Islam censorship?
By Ria Sharma

Google, as the largest search engine in the world, prides itself on its neutrality.  And by any measure,  it has done a credible job.  Not perfect, but better than most tech companies in the world.  Even when the powerful Gawker blog group in USA published stories mocking a few of Google’s key executives, the search engine continued to index them.

Google has found it harder to stand up to Governments in China and India.

But has Google allowed critical analysis and negative views about all major religions to be indexed and become an element of Auto Suggest module?

If you type in ‘Hinduism is …’ in the Google search engine, you are immediately prompted by Google suggestions including

‘
Hinduism is false
Hinduism is wrong
Hinduism is not a religion
….
“

If you do a similar search for Buddhism, Christianity and other great religions, you get the same prompts ‘is false.  Is wrong’ etc.

But is you type ‘Islam is ..’,  it censors such negative suggestions.

While this has been going on for many months, no one was quite sure why Google was soft on Islam while giving negative auto suggests for all other religions. After all,  aren’t all religions equal in the eyes of God? And even tech companies with supernatural powers due to their market dominance?

This month, Wired shot off a question to Google.  Google got back saying “This is a bug and we are working to fix it as quickly as possibly”.

It has been more than a week since Google admitted to this software bug. If  you do a search today, you will still see what seems like censorship favouring one religion over another.