It was brought to my attention that when you Googled the word 'Jew,' the antisemitic hate site, Jew Watch, comes up as the top result on what is beyond a doubt the most frequently relied upon search engine in the world. Apparently, troubled by his recent discovery of this fact, a staff reporter at San Francisco's j. magazine brought this matter to the attention of Google's executives, who showed little more than indifference towards the revelation.
The reality is that many people do research and get their facts by doing a Google search or like search engines. I personally have been brought to anti-Semitic/biased web sites unknowingly through using Google and the fact that the Google executives were indifferent to this occurrence is disturbing. Does anyone have any thoughts on this subject? I feel we have a responsibility to at least tell our patrons to question the validity of information they find on the web. Perhaps we can come up with a list of not-so-obvious biased web sites. Who knows, this may bring people back to using more traditional library resources! Thanks, Amy Stempler I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection The George Washington University Washington, DC (202) 994-2675 ========================================================================== HaSafran - The Electronic Forum of the Association of Jewish Libraries Submissions for HaSafran, send to: Hasafran at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listserver at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 at osu.edu AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org/
