Once a year you notice that for an entire month your neighbor doesn’t eat or drink during the day. You hear that this is known as the month of Ramadan. You are curious and worldly and you would like to know more about your neighbor’s culture and religion. You may not feel comfortable asking your neighbor. So you resort to the next best thing — Google! — that wonderful tool that helps you trawl through monstrous masses of online information to find the most esoteric information out there.
You may not differentiate between Arabs as an ethnic group and Islam as a religion. You start punching in the words “why do Arabs...” And here you will be baffled, amused or horrified at what happens next.
The ‘Google Suggest’ feature, a labor saving device designed to predict queries will automatically suggest completing your query with ‘why do Arabs stink?’ or ‘why do Arabs have big noses?’
The suggestions are not programmed by Google but rather are based on an algorithm that takes the frequency of Google queries into account.
Other top suggestions yielded by typing “Why do Arabs” in Google’s search include: “Why do Arabs and Jews fight,” “Why do Arabs own gas stations,” “Why do Arabs lose wars” and “Why do Arabs throw rocks.”
It is not hard to understand why Arab interest groups such as the London-based Arab Media Watch (AMW) have started to remonstrate against the suggestions.
“What’s worrying is that these (suggestions) are based on the overall popularity of searches, so if you may not have been looking for that, many other people have,” Guy Gabriel, advisor to AMW told The Media Line. “We’re in a day and age where the Internet is a tool by which we break down barriers and learn more about different communities across the world so it’s alarming to notice on Google that this isn’t the case as it stands.”
The organization advocating fair and objective coverage of Arab issues in the British media says Google is “failing in its aim to avoid offending a large audience of users,” and said the feature not only perpetuates stereotypes but also highlights a worrying trend among Google users.
“I’m not suggesting that Google are aware of this and they are refusing to do anything about it,” Gabriel said. “Now that it has been flagged, they are in a position to do something about it.”
Similar queries on other ethnic groups suggest that Google users think Jews have long noses and are rude and cheap, Asians smell bad and have bad teeth and Chinese people have bad breath.
AMW claimed that while searches regarding other ethnic groups produced a similar range of pejorative or stereotypical suggestions, queries about Arabs yielded more offensive results than other groups, and a search using Jews produced noticeably far less.
In searching for ‘Why do Jews’, for example, two pejorative suggestions were raised out of a list of 10: ‘why do Jews have big noses’ and ‘why are Jews hated’. Remaining suggestions were more informative, such as ‘why do Jews celebrate Passover.’
“It’s not to say Arabs should feel singled out,” Gabriel said. “We’re drawing attention to this fact.”
