NEWS Controversial anti-Semitic website Jew Watch has disappeared from Google, but the search site says it had nothing to do with it –despite calls for the company to remove the offending site from its results.
As of Monday only an old image of the Jew Watch site could be found from a Google search on 'Jew', buried five pages within the search results.
A Google spokesman attributed the change to a combination of timing and web hosting policies. The account for Stormfront, a neo-Nazi site that had supported Jew Watch, apparently was cancelled last week by web hosting service EV1 and the site was inaccessible for several days.
Jew Watch has since resurfaced on another hosting service, but its downtime coincided with the periodic "crawls" Google makes to ensure that web addresses are valid. For now, Jew Watch doesn't exist as far as Google is concerned - at least until the company does another crawl in a month or so.
The spokesman said: "Our crawler was unable to reach the site while it was offline, so it dropped from our index. If they remain online over the next month, it's likely we'll pick it up again."
David Becker writes for News.com
Comments
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1. alex piner
Actually, it is still in the index.
Type jewwatch into Google, and you will see this garbage as the third result.
Google has a disclaimer at the top of results for the term Jew regarding the matter.
This is an interesting intersection of censorship, search engine optimization, and the limits of free speech.
2. Arlene Simone
I checked and while "Jew Watch" is no longer on the search engine, it is indeed still on the index, and it is an outrage.
We signed a petition and got the "Jew Watch" off the google engine (Ed note. Sorry to tell you but the disappearance of Jew Watch had nothing to do with people power and more likely than not it will be back, it was simply a technical switch which meant it dropped from the listing), now it's time to get this horrendous anti-semitic propoganda off the net entirely.
3. Seth Finkelstein
It's back now.
See my discussion at
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/google/jew-watch.php
4. anonymous
check again. jewwatch is right back on the top. Try an image search of "jew" and the results are equally offensive.