Those of us who run our own websites and blogs understand that being ranked highly in Google’s search engine equals more ad revenue.
So it is with shock and surprise that a blog with an extremely racist image of The First lady Michelle Obama is ranked #1 in search engine results for her name. Does that make sense?
Well, Google seems to think so. In response to the outpouring of criticism, Google took out ad space to explain the algorithms they use to rank blog pages:
“The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results… Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.“
Google did end up removing the offending blog from its search results — not because of the offensive image, but because the blog contained malware of spyware that compromised the computers of readers.
