Googling Jihad: How Google’s Search Engines Use Faked Results for Social Engineering

From Free Speech Defense:

What prompted me to write this is the result of a simple Google search for the word “Jihad”. Allow me to summarize the functionality of a Google search; how it is understood and intended to work. 

While my knowledge comes from a variety of sources, it is in line with well-known public authority on the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Matt Cutts. He is an employee and (until recently) a spokesperson for both Google and its search engine, and now works for the Pentagon. 

Google published an “overview” of how SEO works, but in a nutshell, Google searches for the freshest, most authoritative, easiest-to-display (desktop/laptop and mobile) content to serve its search engine users. It crawls, caches (grabs) content, calculates the speed of download, looks at textual content, counts words to find relevance, and compares how it looks on different sized devices. It not only analyzes what other sites link to it, but counts the number of these links and then determines their quality, meaning the degree to which the links in those sites are considered authoritative. 

Further, there are algorithms in place that block the listing of “spammy” sites, although, spam would not be relevant here. And recently, they have claimed to boost sites using HTTPS to promote security and privacy (fox henhouse?). 

There are a few exceptions with which I don’t think anyone would take issue: A search for a single word might bring up a dictionary or encyclopedia, but more often, they add Wikipedia to the list of results, especially if it is a particularly busy Wiki page that sees near-constant updates. 

There is a way to beat these results and get to the top; by paying for it. The Google Adwords service, places these ads at the top, but very clearly identifies them with a little “Ad” icon. 

This is not, however, what is happening with the search I mentioned earlier. From within the United States, when you search for the word “Jihad” in the Google search engine, the result is a list of 32 million results, the top four of which (in order) are as follows:

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