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Google Quietly Blocks Controversial Sites

Some of the search engine's international sites no longer link to pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic sites, researchers find.

Laura Rohde, IDG News Service

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Internet search engine company Google has been discreetly removing over 100 controversial sites from some search result listings on its German and French Web sites, according to a study from Harvard University's Berkman Center.

The study found that listings for 113 Web sites that are anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or related to white supremacy have been either partially or fully removed from Google.fr and Google.de, though they are available on the U.S. site, Google.com, according to the report posted Tuesday on Harvard University's Berkman Center Web site.

Google, in Mountain View, California, could not immediately be reach for comment.

Automated Testing

The Harvard study, conducted by assistant professor Jonathan Zittrain and law student Benjamin Edelman, used automated testing, conducted between October 4 and October 21, of Google's 2.5 billion page index to compare the results returned by different foreign-language versions.

The study found that among the banned sites are a "white pride" site, Stormfront.org, and a fundamentalist Christian site opposing abortion, Jesus-is-lord.com.

Testing revealed that 65 sites removed from German google.de were also removed from French google.fr results with an additional 48 sites removed only from google.fr results.

Zittrain and Edelman point out that German and French Internet users can still circumvent such bans by simply conducting searches on Google.com.

Court Cases

German law forbids material that is considered to incite racial and ethnic hatred, including the publication of Holocaust denials. Similar laws exist in France. Both countries have been involved in high profile cases in an attempt to get Internet providers to block access to offending U.S. Web sites.

Last year, a French students' anti-racism group successfully sued Yahoo in a Paris court for allowing Third Reich memorabilia and Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" to be offered to French users of Yahoo's auction sites.

In November, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed a similar case brought against Yahoo in the U.S. by French organizations, citing the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

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