Google Now Showing Suggestions for “Islam Is”

Update: Google is now showing suggestions for "Islam is". They can be seen in the screenshot below.

Original Article: Every now and then, someone spots an oddity in Google's suggestions. Some are funny. Some are disturbing, and some are just weird. Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web has discovered an interesting behavior in Google Suggest involving religion.

With most major religions, you will get suggestions from Google when you type in a query like "example is". If you type "christianity is", or "judaism is" you will get suggestions (which some will no doubt find controversial in themselves), but when you type "islam is", you get nothing.

Here are a few screenshots for different examples of such queries:

 

To be fair, there are other religions that don't yield suggestions, but all of the biggest ones besides Islam do.

The phenomenon has raised a few eyebrows. Wilhem himself says, "Google is systematically blocking, it seems, all search suggestions for Islam. Why? To remove the chance of an adherent of the faith from being offended by a perhaps severe search suggestion? Why not treat all search terms equally?"

He thinks that either "A: Google is horribly broken and this is evidence of that or B: They seem to be tampering with results."

Danny Sullivan, one of the most influential voices in the search industry weighed in on the conversation, saying, "Google is horribly broken. That’s my call. And they do such a piss poor job explaining why these types of things happen (sometimes not even trying at all) that it’s easier to believe B, that they’re tampering with search suggestions."

He points to a piece he wrote about Google Suggest and Climategate, "Many people are convinced that Google messed with the suggestions for that," says Sullivan. "Google was adamant they did not. I still believe they didn’t. I also can only tell you from covering Google over the years that things like this are far more likely to be because they are indeed screw ups than that they are intentionally aiming to do so."

A query for "islam is" returns about 3,140,000 results. Others have pointed out that there are no suggestions for queries like "Larry Page is" or "Sergey Brin is", although Sullivan is careful to point out that there are plenty for "Google is," and they're not all the most positive things in the world.

What do you make of Google's suggestions or lack thereof? Share your thoughts here.

What Would You Change About Google Search?

Google's Matt Cutts, as you may know, frequently appears in videos for Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. In these videos he answers questions submitted by Google users. One of the latest ones features a different kind of (and perhaps more fun) question:

If you could improve one thing or add a feature to Google Search right now, what would it be? (Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... what your answer would be.)

Every Google user probably has an answer for this question, and the differences among those answers are limitless. It is interesting to hear what Cutts himself has to say on the subject though, considering he has kind of become the unofficial posterboy for giving webmasters information about the inner-workings of the world's most popular search engine.

Matt says there are actually a lot of things he would like to see added to Google Search, but one thing comes immediately to mind for him. When you do a search on Google (for example for "flowers"), the URL you get for the results is not just www.google.com/search?q=flowers. There are always other parameters such as "hl=en" and others.

Cutts finds this annoying because he emails search results a lot, and English is the only language he speaks. He says he has even considered writing a Greasemonkey script that would eliminate the extra parameters. He also says he's tried to get some people at Google to consider changing it, but nobody is very exited about the idea because not that many people email search result URLs around.

"But who knows? Maybe some day I will prevail," Cutts proclaims with a smile on his face.

It's interesting to look at the comments for Matt's video. Other people have made suggestions for what they would change about Google search. Suggestions include more control over regular expressions, a date limiting factor on search results beside the search box, and Google Alerts recognizing hyphens in searches.

What would you change about Google Search? Is there a feature you would add? Is there one you would like to see removed? Comment here.

YouTube Gets Faster With “Feather” Beta

YouTube's supposed to be fun and easy to use; people want to visit the site and, in short order, view all sorts of interesting clips.  Making things load more quickly is a solid goal, then, and Google's pursuing it with the launch of a new project called "Feather."

The official explanation states, "The 'Feather' project is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible.  It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser."

By Alex Chitu's count, Feather's quite effective, too, taking that total from the neighborhood of 400 KB (391 KB, to be exact) to 52 KB.  And it'll probably be a rare person who can't live without search suggestions, the option to make a comment, and the couple of other things it cuts.

Perhaps the one issue would-be users should watch out for is the fact that Feather doesn't yet work for all videos.

Otherwise, this development counts as a very nice step forward in Google's march to make the Web faster.

Have You Read This?

> Google Launches Site Performance Feature

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Yahoo Suggests Searchers Use Other Yahoo Properties

Yahoo has started rolling out some new Search Assist features for its web search boxes. They are present in the search boxes of most Yahoo properties. For example, you can find them on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, or Yahoo Finance.

"These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers," explains Yahoo Search Senior Product Manager Linda Wang. "You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most."

The features allow you to quickly get more info about movies, sports, travel destinations, stock prices, etc. For instance, you can type a stock symbol and the Search Assist layer will display real-time stock quotes, links to stock charts, and news about the company. Or you can type an athlete's name and quickly get news, game log info, scores, schedules, etc.

In addition to these features, Yahoo has also launched the ability for Search Assist to help you navigate to different Yahoo properties, depending on your query. Let's say you type "mail" in the search box. You will get a link to Yahoo Mail - specifically, your inbox, right in the Search Assist layer. Or you can type "news" or "U.S. News" and get a link to Yahoo News or specifically the U.S. section of Yahoo News.
 

Finally, Yahoo has added a "smart detection system" to Search Assist, which will take you to Yahoo Image Search or Yahoo News Search for different queries. So if you searched for "obama," you would get quick links to an "obama" image query and an "obama" news query.

It's hard to say how long these features will be around if Yahoo's deal with Microsoft goes through. Bing should be replacing Yahoo search on the back-end. This might be considered a front-end frill that Yahoo keeps around though.

Have You Read This?

> Following Study, Yahoo Proud Of Search Assist

> Yahoo's Search Assist is There When you Need It

> Are You Fatigued By Search?

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