Considering monotheism on the back of that post about Akenhaten, I was looking for something to illustrate the concept, when it occured to me – for the very first time – to see what would happen if I just typed the word "god" into an image search.
This painting of Krishna was the first to come up, from a blog called Get Much Information (Hindu Gods - 7). Capitalising the G made no difference; monotheistic or pantheistic, "God" and "god" both turned up exactly the same results. I think you can click on these to get a closer look. That's Krishna, top left...
I thought this find surprising enough to share, and was about to write "Look what I happens when I google God", when I realised I hadn't actually googled God, because I don't use Google, I use Ecosia.
So I typed "God" into Google...
... and got markedly different results. Again, it didn't matter whether the "g" was upper case or lower, in contrast to Ecosia's mainly Hindu pantheon, Google gave me wall-to-wall Abrahamic Lord and Father (click to enlarge)...
Which is when I realised I should probably try every other search engine too.
Next up then was Yahoo...
Krishna again! From Hindu Gods 7, together with almost identical results to Ecosia's. I'd expected Yahoo to be more Googly, but no...
What other search engines were there?
Ask.com didn't have an image search facility, as far as I could find,
but if you're interested, its top result for "God" was the site Reading Christadelphians - a Bible-based community.
Microsoft Bing, however...
Krishna yet again. A whole line-up incredibly similar to Ecosia's and Yahoo's. But with one notable addition. See if you can spot it...
That's right. "God's Face", dead centre... 
According to The Daily Mail's website, this "youthful and feminine" face was an e-fit conjured up by the Univeristy of Northern Carolina "with the help of 511 American Christians", which raises a number of questions I probably don't want answered, and anyway that's not real investigative journalism, this is. Finding out what religion various search engines are (bearing in mind, of course, that Islam's non-figurative tradition means we'll never know how Muslim a search engine is).
What about AOL? America On Line...
Why were Google's results were so different?
Oh, hi Krisha! And hi, guys...
By now I was having to run a search for search engines, because I couldn't think of any more, and found this list of fifteen.
Baidu was one I hadn't heard of so I typed "God" into that, and finally...
A different perspective...
Baidu is a Chinese engine.
This meant I found it quite difficult to find the image button, and when I did press it, the following text popped up at the top of my screen...
... which I think says "God lie".
Yandex was another engine I hadn't heard of...
Ah! A heavily accessorised, but definitely identifiable, Abrahamic if not
exclusively Christian deity again: glowing wafer, pyramid hat, staff with two
fingers raised, bird holding another origami bird, it's all there. I think Yandex is Russian...
And the last search engine on the list was called DuckDuckGo...
Shiva!
Finally I decided, as a change of tack, to try an online "Artificial Intelligence" text-to-image machine – or API. But all this gave me was a series of hairy, missshapen pigs...
Here's some excellent research form Joel Morris, commenting on facebook: "I think a lot of the non-Google engines might share or pool their data / algorithms, maybe? Are non Google search engines like Londis? A cartel to try and balance the big lad?... Just done some web looking and it seems that Google has a 90%+ market share, but Bing - the next biggest - is what powers Yahoo and so on. I imagine Ecosia must be using a similar system - the little guys borrowing number crunching from each other. It can’t be economic to have your own expensive bespoke data chewing algorithm and search if you’re just getting a less than one per cent market share."
ReplyDeletePerhaps this test demonstrates less about what religions search engines are in the abstract, but who funds them. More "e pecunia unum" than anything else. Although it's a hugely interesting find. I recall many years ago testing the censorship of sites with similar searches. Amazing how certain controversial moments (a special hello to the man with shopping bags in a Beijing square) can be moved further down the list or off it altogether. A fun thing to do if you're ever bored.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe it's just Krishna is the one true god. Big if true.
I'm pretty sure even Krishna never said that. I still can't work out if monotheism was a step closer to atheism from pantheism or a step away from it.
ReplyDelete