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Search Engine Censorship


Let’s face it, you can find just about anything on the Internet. And that’s not always such a good thing.

In fact, National Public Radio recently reported on how some have gotten so fed up with the flood of Internet flotsam that they’re turning their backs on traditional search engines and finding online helps that more closely match their religious standards. The report mentioned a handful of faith-centric engines that tailored searches to meet their readers’ sensibilities.

For some reason, though, using these kinds of web surfing tools just ticks some people off. How dare anyone filter the Internet’s precious content?

Blogging responders on the NPR website just couldn’t quite understand why believers would want to stem the Internet’s flood of information. One fumed that “Faith is ill-tolerant to education, and one must be informed to be educated.” Another worried, “No wonder our country is so divided.” And yet another cried, “In a time when we should be looking to become more tolerant, more open minded, more inclusive … this. Sad.”

Now, I’m certainly not one to cheer for locking your doors against the world and throwing away the key. Education, to this faith-minded person’s way of thinking, is a good thing. But I know families that might use these types of special search engines not to block something like arguments about the mosque at Ground Zero, but simply to keep potentially explicit content away from their family computers. (Although I did get a chuckle out of the report’s statement that a search for “Democratic Party” on a Christian search engine, SeekFind, turned up a site on Marxism as its first result. When I gave it a try it turned up a link for the Institute for Creation Research.)

Putting all political rimshots aside, though, The NPR blog complaints still feel to me like much ado about nothing. Are we really talking about censorship on the level of a bonfire roasting classic novels?

“It’s no more censorship than if I find something on television that I find offensive to me and I could change the channel,” said Michael Gartenburg, a partner at the technology research firm Altimeter Group.