Google Disables Some Nationality-Based Search Suggestions

Google has crippled its search suggestions tool for some search terms that refer to particular races and/or nationalities of people. The company says it’s a deliberate move based on Google’s policy against violence and hate speech, and not a technical bug like the one that led the phrase “islam is” to be disabled earlier this year. More on that in a moment; first, here’s what’s happening.

Searches for some queries that combine a race/nationality and the word “are” are no longer showing any Google search suggestions. You can see below that typing “muslims are” into Google’s search box shows suggestions until the word “are” appears.

The same thing happens on phrases like “jews are,” “americans are,” “christians are,” and “african americans are.”

When asked about the disabled search suggestions, a Google spokesperson quoted some of what’s explained on the help page about Google Suggest:

The search queries that you see as part of Google Suggest are a reflection of the search activity of all web users. While we always strive to neutrally and objectively reflect the diversity of content on the web (some good, some objectionable), we also apply a narrow set of removal policies for pornography, violence, and hate speech.

We don’t know how many nationalities/races are affected by this, nor when it began, but some still have their search suggestions active with the word “are.” I quickly found these two examples:

Earlier this year, the phrase “islam is” stopped showing search suggestions, too. Google told us that was a technical bug, and that search does, in fact, show search suggestions now. As you can see, most of those suggestions are negative.

The suggestions for “christianity is” and similar phrases are also highly unfavorable, which suggests that Google is saying its hate speech policy applies to individuals (i.e., “muslims are”) but not to entities (i.e., “islam is”).

(via Search Engine Roundtable)