YNOT – Seek and ye shall not find.A growing number of businesses with ties to Christian, Muslim and Jewish faith groups have developed what they tout as “sin-free” internet search engines. The products promise to deliver more relevance with less temptation by filtering out results for sites about alcohol, pornography and other vices. Some, like Christian-oriented SeekFind, index only sites that present a particular worldview. Others, like the Muslim engine I’mHalal, index everything but replace “inappropriate” results with educational messages explaining why a visit to a certain site may endanger one’s immortal soul.
“We think that the other search engines are way too ‘Main Street’-oriented,” Reza Sardeha, the 21-year-old Kuwaiti founder of I’mHalal, told global news agency AFP. “We wanted to provide a solution to explore the web in a safe environment where you won’t bump into explicit content or immoral websites, like pornography.”
Ironically, I’mHalal is based in Amsterdam, a world capital of licentious behavior. Type “alcohol” into I’mHalal, and the engine returns an explanation of the Muslim viewpoint about substance abuse. Type in “pornography” and receive … a blank page. According to Sardeha, the site has been online for only a year and already attracts 10 million users monthly, primarily from Pakistan and the U.S., but also from Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.
“Actually, we know that our users are not only Muslims, and once a week we get an email from non-Muslims as well saying that they like the content of our safe search engine and they allow their children to search knowing they won’t bump into offensive content,” Sardeha told AFP.
Colorado Springs-based SeekFind offers even more security for fundamentalist Christians, according to founder Shea Houdmann. A statement at SeekFind notes the engine “only index[es] websites that are Biblically-based, theologically sound and in agreement with our statement of faith. That way, you can have confidence that you will find content which will be God-honoring and spiritually encouraging.”
Houdmann told AFP the engine is designed to function as “a research tool for people who are looking for biblical and theological content from an evangelical Christian perspective.” That perspective includes substituting results about Marxism when users search for “Democratic Party,” according to National Public Radio. SeekFind also lectures searchers about eternal damnation when they search for “gay marriage.”
Jewish search engines like Jewogle and Maven tend to index culturally relevant websites or focus on individuals of merit instead of policing morality or overtly politicking. Jewogle, in fact, aspires to index famous and infamous individuals with Jewish antecedents.
While each of the religiously oriented search engines necessarily limits users’ perspective on the World Wide Web, they may, in fact, be bringing new users online.
“You have an emerging generation and emerging culture that wants to take advantage of technology … search engines and the things that they provide, but at the same point, be true to their heritage … and not stray from their belief system,” Michael Gartenberg, partner at technology research firm Altimeter Group, told NPR.
Critics of the engines see both censorship and intolerance in their operation. Gartenberg told NPR he views the sites as more “selectively inclusive” than censorial. While the engines may promote a certain degree of divisiveness and provide users with only information with which they already agree, “It’s no more censorship than if I find something on television that I find offensive to me and I change the channel,” he said.
