In the hours BC (before coffee), that is, while I’m bleary-eyed and imbibing my two allotted cups of the day, it is my wont to go through a minimum of 12 hours’ worth of my Facebook newsfeed, posting and commenting on items that catch my interest. This morning, a screenshot of a Google search, shared by Elad Nehorai over at PopChassid caught my eye.
(photo credit: Varda Epstein)
As you can see, the words, “Jews should,” were entered into the Google search box and Google obligingly attempted to fill in the rest of the search parameters according to the most popular searches starting with the words, “Jews should.”
We get:
jews should be wiped out
jews should leave Israel
And the ever popular:
jews should get over the holocaust
I’m the skeptical type, so before I went ahead and shared this item, I checked it out on my own. I opened a new tab in my browser, went to Google and repeated Elad’s search.
Bingo. Got exactly the same thing.
So I shared Elad’s screenshot with a comment stating that I had repeated the search with the same results. But a funny thing happened at that point. My friends started sharing their own screenshots and they were not homogeneous.
L. commented, for instance, “Mine said “Jews shouldn’t eat gebrokts” but my Google is Chabad. What can I say,” while M wrote, “Well this is what I got. Jews for J… , Jew’s Harp, Jews in Hollywood and my personal favorite – Jews in Space.”
The various responses got me thinking. It’s not a new idea that Google tailors searches to its users, Google explains it this way:
By personalizing your results based on your search history, we hope to deliver you the most useful, relevant content for your search. Search history personalization is just one of the ways that we show you more personalized search results.
So keeping this in mind, it makes logical sense that when L searches, “Jews should,” she gets something about not eating gebrokts because L is into Chassidus and her Google history would reflect that interest, while M gets funny stuff because his hobby is creating Jewish political cartoons and he appreciates quality comedy.
Then I remembered something. Just before the High Holidays, I talked to my manager atKars4Kids, Robert Moskovits, and he gave me a short lesson in using Google to take the pulse of our nonprofit organization. He gave me a search term and we each did the same search. We got different results.
Then Robert showed me how to use the Google Chrome browser to make a search unadulterated by my personal preferences by using Google’s incognito mode. Once I adjusted for region, we both got the same results using the same search parameters. I thought this was a super cool geek thing to know and I stored it away in my mind for future reference.
Google says this about the incognito browsing mode:
For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Here’s how the incognito mode works:
- Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren’t recorded in your browsing and download histories.
- All new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you’ve opened.
- Changes made to your Google Chrome bookmarks and general settings while in incognito mode are always saved.
I decided to open a Chrome incognito window and repeat the “jews should” search there, hoping for a definitive answer as to the most likely worldwide searches starting with these two words. I got this:
jews should go back to poland
jews should all die
jews should be perfected
jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals
jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife
jews should get over the holocaust
jews should be wiped out
jews should leave france
jews should leave Israel
It was incredibly painful to read these results, especially since I realized that these results are representative of world feeling against the Jews as opposed to Google just spitting out what it thinks I want to see. Just to make sure, I asked RealJStreets here at Israellycool to repeat my search using the incognito browsing mode. RealJ opened an incognito session and got an exact duplicate of my results, after adjusting for regional settings.
So there you have it in a nutshell, folks. This is the truth of what the world thinks about the Jews and about Israel: We don’t deserve our own state; we should go back to Eastern Europe and die. We should have offered our necks up to the Nazi butchers. We should stop b****ing about the Holocaust; we should be annihilated; we should leave Israel Judenfrei; and get out of France.
Oh, and that bit about being perfected? We should convert to Christianity because let’s face it, as Jews, we’re fatally flawed.
