From jill/txt:
I read about this at Nicholas Carr’s site: The top hit for “Martin Luther King” on Google is to a white supremacist site, martinlutherking.org, that is billed as “the truth about Martin Luther King.” It’s cleverly designed to look – at first glance – like a bona fide informational site, and recommends itself to teachers and students, but a closer look shows it’s anything but neutral – it’s a racist rewriting of history. AOL gets their search results from Google and requested Google remove the site from the results shown to AOL customers, as AOL didn’t want to support a racist site. Google refused, reiterating their strange litany about the sanctity of their algorithm, and how their results must remain untampered with by human hands.
I’ve written about Google’s strange idea of objectivity before. I realise that once you start messing with some results you might get into trouble – but the idea that an algorithm (programmed by humans…) is objective is ludicrous.
Checking who linked to the site I see that large numbers of the links are from libraries and educational sites explaining how to evaluate the validity of information online. And yes, martinlutherking.org is a textbook example. However, all those links from sites that clearly do not condone the site have been interpreted by Google as recommendations. Hooray.
I’m taking the time, today, to write to as many of the non-racist sites that link to martinlutherking.org as I can and ask them to please remove the links. If more people are aware that linking means condoning – according to Google’s infallible algorithm – perhaps the misinformation site will drop in rankings to where it belongs.
(Related: David Weinberger pointed out a similar issue that comes up if you search for “jew” on Google – the top results used to be anti-semittic sites. Google put up a “sponsored link” (thus top of the hits) explaining that they’re disturbed about this too and explaining their position and how to find correct information.)
I agree that it’s unfortunate that the anti-MLK site is the top hit for searches on MLK, but I wonder about emailing those who link to the site and asking them to take down the link is the right thing to do. Isn’t this the modern version of censorship? Let’s go back 30 years and say this isn’t a website, but rather a book in the library, and it looks very authoritative. An unsavvy reader wouldn’t recognize that it was written by white supremacists. Someone asks the library to either a) pull the book from the shelves, or b) (and this one is more analogous to this situation) yank the book from the card catalogue system so that people won’t stumble upon the book as easily.
I’d rather people didn’t go to the site as well, but if we continue teaching information literacy, then perhaps it won’t be so “bad” if “dangerous” websites are at the top of Google searches. Of course, if the site is somehow making money off the number of hits it gets, then it’s another story. I also have to giggle at some of the politics of this. We liberal and radical folk are disturbed that this site is at the top of Google’s search, but we all were in joyous reverie when the White House’s website came up as the top hit for a Google search for a negative word a few years ago (my memory is faulty. Was the word ineffective?). Of course, these two sitatutions aren’t entirely analagous, but the sentiment is there: Google searches should match my politics.
I’m not asking for the book’s card to be taken out of the catalogue system – I’m asking people who linked to it without wanting to condone it to remove the links. Some have replied saying they’re putting in a nofollow attribute instead which is great.
The card’s still going to be in the catalogue, it’s just (I hope) not going to be the first thing a ten-year-old finds when she dips into the catalogue wondering who Martin Luther King was.
The vast majority of people linking to the site do not condone it but are using it in teaching infomration literacy. They did not mean their links to be counted as votes of confidence in the site – but that they perhaps did not realise that linking pushes a site up the ranking on Google. The other links in the first thirty or forty hits were all from stormfront.org, run by the same guy who made the martinlutherking.org site. Obviously I’m not writing to them: they meant their links.
You’re right, it’s not pulling the card from the catalogue. A better analogy would be “There are 1 million cards for this book, and only 80 for this book. Why don’t we re-proporition them.”
I agree with your intent, Jill: I don’t want a 10-year-old’s first encounter with MLK to be that site either. Which is why I’m a bit ambivalent about it. On the one had, I want to say let the google algorithms work the way they do (mysterious as they are); on the other hand, I want to say let’s manipulate them (like googling “rick santorum” and finding a new definition for his name instead of the senator’s webpage).
I didn’t realize you could do a nofollow attribute (in fact, I had to google it to know exactly what it was: from searchenginewatch). That’s pretty cool news, and I readily support you contacting people to change links if they are using nofollow.