NPR: Religious search engines

Submitted by Gabor Por on Mon, 2010-09-13 09:00

A few days ago I mentioned how we like to read content that conforms our belief system. Today NPR had a short piece about religious search engines. These sites take this concept even further and provide their users with search results only from sites approved by the editorial boards of these companies. The NPR piece, titled Religious Search Engines Yield Tailored Results, was written and produced by Habiba Nosheen, an award winning Pakistani/Canadian/American journalist. After the introduction of the topic and a brief mention of SeekFind, a Christian search engine, we learn more about the users and creators of I'mHalal, a Muslim one. The second half of the article compares and contrasts the views of whether such search engines practice censorship or their "selective inclusion" brings new users to the web. I found the piece lacking clarity. Maybe the editors cut it short, but calling the voluntary use of a limited search engine censorship is misleading. Had they talked about the gatekeeping role in closed communities, where the only allowed and/or socially approved search engine is a religious one I'd have found the debate more meaningful. That's one of the research topics of Karine Nahon (Barzilai-Nahon), which I will talk about in another post. I also missed a bit of analysis of the technologies involved at religious search engines. From my, technically inclined, point of view it is important which of three options a site uses. Most religious search engines simply create a "Google Custom Search", a service that allows to use Google search feature on a limited, predefined set of sites. This is what Jewogle (mentioned in the article) is using. One step up on the ladder of complexity is using a commercial (or open source) search engines that you actually need to install on your server, because it indexes and searches the content of your site internally. For example SeekFind is using Zoom. (This kind of solution is typical for "older" search engines that have been around since before Google started to offer its Custom Search solution.) I'mHalal, however decided to create its own technology and algorithm, which is the most time, skill and money consuming option of the three. From a user perspective there may not be much difference, but the effort it takes to set up a search engine varies a great deal: setting up a Google Custom Search can be done in 5 minutes; downloading, purchasing, and installing Zoom can be done in half an hour, but if you want the right kind of results you will need to configure it to your needs, which adds more time. Developing your own search engine from scratch is a major enterprise. The level of customization also changes along these levels of technical options. If you test drive the various Jewish search engines I listed below you will see that Koogle's results page is most unique, while the others' are very similar to each other. Google offers some customization in terms of colors and fonts, but the elements of the page will always be the same. Google Custom Search