Described as ‘when semantic extraction goes horribly wrong’… these are the results of a disastrously untested search engine being let loose on the net… and screenshots of howlers are growing day by day on forum and blog posts. At release, an article on TechCrunch revealed that a search for ‘Causes of AIDS’ rather unfortunately listed ‘Jew’, due to it’s inability to distinguish between the disease and the verb ‘to aid’, which could be found in a Wikipedia article on Jewish history. A company representative offered an explanation to TechCrunch author Leena Rao:

“This is an unfortunate example of homonymy, i.e. words that have different meanings.The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease “AIDS” and the verb “aids” (as in aiding someone). If you click on the result “Jew” you see a sentence from a Wikipedia page about 7th Century history: “Hispano-Visigothic king Egica accuses the Jews of aiding the Muslims, and sentences all Jews to slavery. ” Although Wikipedia contains a lot of great health information it also contains non-health related information (like this one) that is hard to filter out.”

LanguageLog also blogged the site under the most appropriate title ‘Semantic FAIL’, with readers posting their own examples of search results… my favourite so far was the suggested treatment for Hookers: ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’.