Rating Web content for quality can be tricky, especially when it's just a piece of software that's doing the judging.
The rating policies of a little-known search engine, Yep.com, are raising hackles in the unlikeliest quarters.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a prominent Jewish anti-hate group, is furious at Yep.com for giving the thumbs-up to racist sites.
Yep.com searches a limited database of sites and then rates them on popularity and quality. The database consists of websites that sign up with Yep.com to use a piece of proprietary software called HitBox Tracker. The tracker provides detailed traffic information, which is then used to generate the ratings.
The center's main gripe: The search function works regardless of the search term.
"When we put in the N-word, it brought up a list of hate sites, which were rated with two, three stars or five stars," said Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper.
Similar results came with the terms "dirty Jew" and "hate music," he said.
Cooper is offended that Yep.com does not differentiate between racist content and, say, home repair. He says such an attitude makes hateful content more acceptable.
"It's never good to allow the parking of hate in the mainstream of society," he said.
Yep.com spokesman Erik Bratt says differentiating on the basis of content is equivalent to censorship. In an email to Wired News, he wrote, "(A)s a search engine, it is not our role to decide which sites people can find on the Web."
Cooper argues Yep.com is already in the business of judging content. "They're talking about issues of quality and telling people where they should go," he said. "They say they don't want to be connected any way with content, but they are already editors."
He says the company is far too absorbed in making money to address concerns about racism. "It's not about the First Amendment. This is a market decision," Cooper said. "Hiding each economic decision behind free speech is phony."
But Yep.com's problems may have more to do with methodology than morality.
While it's easy to rate the popularity of a site, its quality and relevance are often harder to measure.
Yep.com measures quality based on data trapped by the HitBox tracker. Among other things, it looks at how often the site is bookmarked, how many votes it receives, how much time people spend on the site, and how often they come back.
And that kind of numerical criteria can make for some bizarre ratings.
For example, when you search under "Jew," the Jewish Museum in Vienna is rated lower than an obscure anti-semitic site called Global Domination.
"You can't let an algorithm decide quality," said David Goldman, president of HateWatch, which monitors online hate. "Technology companies tend to look for a technical solution. But this needs a human one."
And Yep.com seems to have overlooked the criteria most valued in any search engine: relevance.
A search under "hate music" did not, as feared by the Wiesenthal Center, bring up a list of white supremacist music sites. In fact, two of the top four were "I hate Oasis" sites.
Cooper says he is most upset by Yep.com's refusal to take his concerns into consideration, or at least to develop content guidelines.
But the company says Cooper wanted it to remove offensive sites from its database, which it considers outright censorship.
Internet companies such as Amazon.com have mostly opted for a middle road with regard to racist material. Civil rights groups were upset when the company categorized Holocaust-denial books as World War II history. Amazon responded by creating a separate sub-category for such literature.
Anti-hate groups in the United States rarely call for the removal of an offensive site unless the company itself has strict policies against racist material. And they are satisfied if a company responds on a case-to-case basis, rather than develop an elaborate content policy.
"Like Yahoo and others," Goldman said, "you should be willing to admit errors in cataloging, or rearranging information when appropriate."
