Google suggests Islam is nothing Google's search Suggest function treats Islam a bit differently from the other major religions of the world. It's willing to suggest "Christianity is bullshit" or "Judaism is false," but if you begin to ask what Islam is, it won't suggest a thing. Google says that this search oddity is a bug - and that its search gurus are …
This makes me furious and I doubt I'm the only one. I don't want a religious debate here but as far as I'm concerned islam is always the faith everyone's scared to offend, because they make such a bloody fuss every time someone 'offends' them (usually they just burn flags).
This clearly isn't a bug, what the hell kind of bug would do that. Google needs to man-up, they're pathetic.
"islam is always the faith everyone's scared to offend, because they make such a bloody fuss every time someone 'offends' them"
Not really. Some Muslims make a very big fuss this is true, but it's by no means "they" en masse. Usually it's just a few very angry and very vocal people. The interesting thing is how so few people manage to get so much media attention...
Not only "Islam"...
When you type, say, "Allah is" in Yahoo! you get suggestions like "Allah is Satan", "Allah is not", etc (along with "Allah is great" and the ever-trendy "allah is in the house"). When you type "god is" you get sensibly the same stuff.
On Google, "God is" will give you roughly the same suggestions, while "Allah is" gives you... nothing.
Stangely enough, "Koran is" (and "Quran is") and "Bible is" return roughly the same results (including "is bullshit" and the such) on both search engines. Did the Google "bug" forget to censor a few potentially sensitive suggestions? ("Qur'an is" doesn't yield a terribly high number of suggestions, and none negative, but I guess that this spelling is not often used by infidels.)
Interestingly, "Jehovah is" returns one negative suggestion with Yahoo (along with a lot of positive ones) while Google's suggestion for the same are all positive.
(The conspiracy theorist amongst you will note that "Jehova 9" triggers the obvious "Jehova 9 11" in Yahoo, but yelds nothing in Google...)
Black copter, obviously
Not really sure where Google is going with this. As was pointed out on a bit on The Graham Norton Show recently, phrases like "is it wrong" or "why does" can come up with some rather odd suggestions.
I can understand that they don't want to see news articles about someone horribly offended by getting certain suggestions. But that's impossible. The only sane solution will probably be to make the suggestion feature off by default, and you can turn it on if you want.
...the one true faith, alah must be blocking the query. All those other religions should take note and convert 'cause their gods obviously can't hack it in the 21st century. Certainly beats those melted cheese depictions of jesus and the holy virgin that that other monotheistic flavour of abrahamic-derived god-botherers touts as a miracle.
Sorry to disappoint you conspiracy theorists, but as a Muslim, I can assure you that if we were to actually get upset over something so silly, it would be for "Muhammad is" or "Allah is" rather than "Islam is". Those two would be much more offensive, and both of them work just fine. You even get warm fuzzy phrases like "Allah is satan" and "Muhammad is a false prophet".
It probably is a bug, just not a very important one.
That if it IS being done not to offend, then like all the other pc crap, it is not what offends you that counts, it is what the person choosing to think they can be offended on your behalf might think you'd be offended about.
They are too busy being offended on your behalf to actually listen to or understand what your opinion or beliefs might be, or what might really give you offence or alternatively a good chuckle.
I have yet to hear from anyone who is ACTUALLY offended by these things, it is always some self important git who thinks someone else will be offended by it, and "somethig must be done" about it.
Well. I tried "Allah is" and a few others, (including "Allah is" , "Allah 91" , and also some jewish-related searches) and they some appear to be censored. Now I'm sure that real muslims wouldn't be offended by suggestions made by a search engine. Really. Actually Islam has always been a very tolerant and adaptative religion historically (much more so than judaism or christianism, for example). But the fact is, when you try a couple Islam-related searches on Google the suggestions are obviously censored (as compared to what you get with Yahoo, for example). Noone blames muslims, it's entirely a Google-related issue.
It's not a bug, because the same things happen if you try and type in "muslims are..."
I'm guessing a technician has removed these particular indexes to avoid offending Muslims. Fair enough - they're not actually censoring anything, it will still let you search for these phrases.
It would be a bit more equal, though, if they extended this to other major religions. But now the fact is uncovered... they can't win.
Taking the first suggestion from google I have...
I am... 'i am bored'
bored is ... 'bored is a state of mind
mind is ... 'mind is the magic'
magic is ... 'magic is building'
building is ... 'building is my strong suit'
suit is ... 'suit is too big'
big is ... 'big is beautiful'
beautiful is ... 'beautiful is good'
good is ... 'good is the enemy of great'
enemy is ... 'enemy is us'
us is ... 'us is bankrupt'
bankrupt is ... 'bankruptcy is good'
Repeat forever!! ... Good is the enemy of great. Enemy is the US. US is bankrupt. Bankrupty is good ....
Neil: NO! no! Don't make fun of the Arabs, we'll get into terrible trouble!
Scene: some mid-eastern palace
Grand Vizier: British ambassador is here to apologise for unfavourable comments in British press
Sheik, Sultan, whatever: I will see him now.
Grand Vizier: Which bit of him would you like to see first?
This post has been deleted by its author
Islam is not the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. They just have the misfortune of doing their period of assertion in a time when the world is covered with reporters and dozens of 24 hour news channels all eagerly awaiting scenes of carnage; amidst a populace that once would have smacked you across the face if you dared to say something contrary to the established opinion (i.e. what the bishop/king/lord says). We're ready to film everything and too scared to offend our own shadows.
I know little about Judaism so I won't comment. As for Christianity... do you think the Crusades were warm and fuzzy? Those guys carried swords for a reason. How about the so-called witch hunts? Some people *still* fear witches, despite the most compelling evidence being that witches are either old crones who are bitter about everything, or cute young lesbians that go "ooooh" at flowers, none of which involves, you know, actual witchcraft. Speaking of lesbians, and the male equivalent, the church has a few things to say about that lifestyle choice. And it is horribly mysoginistic. Some Catholic churches seem to take a degree of pride in the "accuracy" of the depictions of Jesus nailed to the cross. I remember many years ago where the blood was drawn basically spewing out of somewhere around his torso and pouring down the cross. I'm surprised it wasn't dripping.
Islam's fault is it is doing all this nonsense now.
The Christians have already done the whole brutal domination thing. And, being the keepers of our history, they tend to have a slightly softer retelling of it than was probably true. Convenient.
Whether Islam is right or wrong is not for me to say. For every point is a counterpoint. There's bad stuff (from a Western perspective) in Islamic culture, but our own culture isn't exactly rosy either.
To accuse Islam of being the worst thing ever to happen to humankind is unacceptable.
[no conflict of interest: agnostic after poor attempt at CofE indoctrination at school...]
worse than Christianity, but the timing of this Islamic crusade coincides with the ability to kill people far more easily than ever before. This gives terrorist/religious states an unfair advantage in that they can feel relatively free to condone or at least not strongly condemn terrorist actions. They rely upon the morality of the states that they are causing harm too to not bomb them into oblivion as the collateral damage would be horrific.
Interesting how their continued existence relies upon the superior morality of those they are targeting.
Dark ages religious ideology at work in an age of global communications, global paranoia, global environmental change, and the easy possibility of mutual assured destruction by our own hands equals bad timing.
Hmm... and you can quantify that? Religion is a phase that we appear to be growing out of, we'd get there a lot quicker if we ignored all flavours of bigotted bleating from those who struggle with the distinction between fictional literature and reality. They're all the same, particularly the monotheistic ones.
You could argue that islam is following a similar trajectory to christianity but is approx 500 yrs younger (and has a distributed rather than centralised leadership). Now, what were christians doing around 500 years ago?
It suits the powers that be to have everyone scared of an external threat, especially if it allows them to justify war.
Quantify the threat posed by terrorists of any flavour and compare it to the threat posed by cars, swimming pools or myriad other trappings of modern life. It's miniscule.
Islam is another way of praising God
Islam is insane
>islam is always the faith everyone's scared to offend< 'MKEI'
Islam is as stupid as every other religion out there except for the Tao
(wow, just found this from Google after searching the above quote:
>Islam means Peace .. and there is no-where written in Quraan to kill non-muslims , in fact it is written in Quraan " If you kill one person , it means you have killed whole humanity ".<)
So, in the end, Islam is just another facet showing off the diversity (fractally schizophrenic nature) of WoMan kind - or, as Spock so eloquently put it, 'infinite diversity in infinite combinations.'
Cache that up your jacksi Google.
It can quite easily be a bug. No one here knows exactly how the suggestion system works so none of us can comment on what type of bug it is, but there are several plausible reasons for it.
I would wait a month or so before expecting it to be fixed.
Google may have fixed it already, but they dont exactly make updates live immediately.
forwarding the query from teh google to the U.S. gov't servers for proper tracking and suggestions. It's taking so long to fix because the order to fix it has to filter its way through eleventeen layers of bureaucracy there. Obviously anyone searching for anything related to Islam is a scary brown and/or otherwise swarthy and untrustworthy person and must be tracked properly, right? </snark>
If the BBC is to be believed then 'Islam Will Dominate the World', that's what the BBC have been advertising all day. And 'Islam will' doesn't Google complete either.
I am not quite sure what Moslems want from the British Isles, I am looking around at the moment, and Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovensko all look quite good, you can get a lot of land there for your Euro, better weather, more space to train for holy wars and all that. Though they shouldn't discount the Arab lands, they are genetically designed for those areas, and there are some jolly nice looking Mosques.
Now the Christians we did send them to the US in the past, and well that is still an option, they think like the Yanks don't they, and we should probably inflict them again on the US. The NHS is crap and corrupt, so is the education system, and I am not even going to comment on the Police or Politics, there is not much going for the UK.
The future is bleak for the UK, and the right step is to go back to Celtic roots. Not sure how Islam fits in here, let's just say they won and they have dominated the World, they can now go home victorious.
I am all for it. Let them herd their goats in peace and have their imans tell them how to think. They can also stone their sisters when they get raped. Damn it we need hurry with this fusion crap so we treat the middle east as we do the rest of the third/fourth world and largely ignore them. If they want to destroy themselves out of ignorance who are we to get in the way.
Evidently don't want to succumb to an unpleasant and terminal dose of Theo van Gogh syndrome - otherwise known as deadinthestreetwithanotepinnedtoyourchestwithasixinchstilettobyabeardedswiveleyednutjobitis - which is occasionally known to afflict those who fail to quietly cringe and go a bit craven before the edicts of Gods Little Bearded Warriors. The smarter ones probably also avoid reading Danish newspapers in public and shopping trips to Wootton Basset.
This cringing really is getting a bit stifling and the excuses for silence wearing a touch thin. If your six year old lets rip in the supermarket because you won't buy him sweeties, you don't generally smile indulgently while he sets fire to fellow shoppers and blows up the odd cashier.
AC because I have a serious allergy to stilettos.
No it most definitely did not work yesterday. I was linked a story about it a few days ago and tried it then, and tried it again yesterday - nada.
It has mysteriously started suggesting again this morning when I tried though. Perhaps divine intervention has fixed it, we can only hope.
Whilst one could draw a very consistent graph of violence against Christians around the world spanning the last 2000 years, I think the relatively momentary blips of violence perpetrated by Christianity's - which coincide with the major Western powers being associated with it at that point - hardly compare to the level of violence seen visited by the Muslim world.
let me burst your bubble here: Christianity was the official religion of the late Roman Empire (see Constantine), and they did plenty of atrocities in their new religion's name. Then there were the Crusades (started by the pope to stop Europeans killing each other, and during which the westerners also massacred plenty of eastern rite Christians). Then there are the wars of religion (cathos vs protestants) that bled Europe for centuries. Then there is colonization, associated with "let's bring the savages our good education and religion". On the other hand, the Muslim world used to have one of the largest empires on earth, and that wasn't held together or acquired by brotherly love, but it was relatively peaceful. And that's it. The Armenian holocaust was perpetrated by a Muslim country, but religion had little to do with it (as far as I'm aware).
Maybe you're thinking about the current terrorist idiots? Well they have murdered by far more Muslims who don't quite agree with them than westerners, just look up Algeria for example. So most of the Muslim violence (which exists, between dictators and nutjobs there is plenty around) actually is directed towards other Muslims, and some of it spills over in the West. Boohoo.
To get back to an IT related angle ... 10 years ago I worked in Silicon Valley and we could use the canteen at a neighbouring companhy for lunch where the main cook was called Jesus (actually a not uncommon name in the Hispanic community) and on Fridays he made quite excellent burritos which were most definitely not microwaved!
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