I won't spend a lot of time reiterating what everyone has probably heard already, but here's the gist of the issue.
An anti-Semitic web site called "Jew Watch" — link to this site definitely not given for reasons I will explain — has been the top-ranked site on Google when you search for the word Jew.
Jew Watch obtained this top ranking because lots of sites link to it; a quick search on Google shows that these sites are the typical anti-Semitic sites in the US as well as a lots of Islamic sites.
To counter this problem, people are linking to the Wikipedia defintion of a Jew.
I suppose I should also mention why I think this really is a problem. Frankly, in most cases, I would think that I would not care if some fool believes that that Jews need watching (God knows that many of my fellow Jews could use a keeper). However, given that many people still suffer from misconceptions both about Jews and about the accuracy of information on the web, it's perhaps best if an anti-Semitic site doesn't have top ranking.
I admit that I do still wonder about Google, however. They have been known on rare occassions to fiddle with the ranking of pages, but they didn't in this case. On the one hand, I understand why they won't except in the most extreme circumtances; otherwise they will constantly be under pressure to fiddle with their system to produce the politically correct result. But I do have a nasty suspicion that if the search term "black" brought up a KKK site, we'd have seen a change. I can only hope not, because I agree with them that Google is fine the way it is.
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