Typing "Christianity is" or "Buddhism is" into the search engine's home page generates a series of offensive suggestions for how the user might wish to complete their query. These include "not a religion", "a cult", "fake" and "bullshit". Few of the suggested searches are positive or neutral.
But attempting a related search for Islam produces no suggested results whatsoever, indicating that Google may be affording a security to Muslims that it does not extend to people of other faiths.
Google Suggest, which is normally considered a useful timesaver, generates its recommendations by analyzing the phrases most regularly entered by other users, as well as the websites it indexes and adverts it has sold.It aims to filter out "pornographic terms, unclean words, and hate and violence terms", and Google retains the power to censor particular suggestions if they receive complaints.
Google has denied protecting Islam from criticism, claiming that the lack of "Islam is" suggested searches is the result of a software problem that will shortly be corrected.
“This is a bug and we’re functioning to fix it as quickly as we can," a spokesman told Wired.com. Entering other search terms involving Islam appears to support Google's claim. "Islam must" generates the suggested searches "die", "be stopped", "be destroyed", "end" and "go".
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