A Jewish museum in Atlanta, Georgia, which has been paying to have its site that tells the truth about the Holocaust appear at the top of a Google search for the phrase "did the Holocaust happen", has accused the search engine behemoth of profiting from Holocaust denial.
A report about this, which appears in The Guardian today, is written by Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist who earlier claimed she had paid Google for an ad to bring up Wikipedia's entry on the Holocaust as the top search result for the same query.
Though Cadwalladr's article shows a screenshot that substantiates her claim, a search done on Google this morning still brings up the website of white supremacist organisation, Stormfront, as the top result for the search string "did the Holocaust happen". This site, Stormfront, denies that the Holocaust happened.
The museum in question is the Breman Museum whose marketing director, David Schendowich, told The Guardian that it was "nauseating" that Google directed users to the white supremacist site.
{loadposition sam08}He said he was paying Google up to US$2 a click to direct users to its own website via AdWords, the service that is a pay-per-click one owned by Google.
Schendowich was quoted as saying about Google: "They may not take money from people denying the Holocaust, but the point is that museums and other organisations are paying to combat this stuff. They plainly are. We are. We’re paying them up to US$2 a click."
In her earlier story, filed on 18 December, titled "How to bump Holocaust deniers off Google’s top spot? Pay Google", Cadwalladr wrote that she had succeeded in paying for an ad to get Wikipedia's entry on the Holocaust listed as the top result instead of the Stormfront website when anyone searched for the string "did the Holocaust happen".
"How did I achieve this impossible feat? Not through writing articles. Or shaming the company into action. I did it with the only language that Google understands: money," she wrote, adding that a Google spokesman had provided this response to a query: "We never want to make money from searches for Holocaust denial, and we don't allow regular advertising on those terms."
But Cadwalladr disputed this claim. "And yet, it has already made £24.01 out of me. (This was the initial cost – it has since risen to £289.) Because this is what I did: I paid to place a Google advert at the top of its search results. 'The Holocaust really happened,' I wrote as the headline to my advert. And below it: '6 million Jews really did die. These search results are propagating lies. Please take action'." She placed the ad via Google's AdSense programme.
Google has been contacted for comment.