Someone at Google apparently has a twisted and most decidedly un-PC sense of humor.
Several New York Times articles that are part of an archived-newspaper service Google provided until 2011, contain the phrase "Jew York Times" in search returns.
We discovered this apparently intentional quirk last week while Googling the name of one of the laid-off Arizona Republic workers, Kerry Fehr-Snyder. Among various articles the veteran reporter has written over the years, the Google search also returns the weird reference to a 1998 story on computers Fehr-Snyder wrote for the "Jew York Times."
The actual scanned-in newspaper contains no snide references to Jews. The problem only shows itself in the short abstract of the search returns.
A few minutes of Googling turned up other archived New York Times stories and one crossword puzzle to which the search returns for news.google.com list the spoof name "Jew York Times."
We've included the samples below.
New Times contacted Google and the New York Times for comment on Friday but hasn't yet heard back.
Google halted its scanned-in newspaper archive service two years ago, so we assume no new search returns with that phrase are being created. But it may be possible for Google to figure out who typed the offensive phrase into its servers -- if, indeed, it was a Google employee or subcontractor who did it.
What's clear is that these archives preserve something that don't deserve to be preserved.
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