Google Says It's Working on "Technical Issue" of Phrase "Jew York Times" in Search Returns

Google tells New Times it's trying to fix the weird appearance of the phrase "Jew York Times" in certain Google News search returns. We'd emailed the tech giant while reporting the quirk, which a Google spokeswoman told us is a "technical issue."...

By Ray Stern

August 7, 2013

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Google tells New Times it's trying to fix the weird appearance of the phrase "Jew York Times" in certain Google News search returns.

We'd emailed the tech giant while reporting the quirk, which a Google spokeswoman told us is a "technical issue."

As we reported, the politically incorrect phrase -- a favorite of NY-Times-hating bigots -- shows up in the search returns of some news.google.com archived NY Times articles. Google halted its newspaper archive service in 2011, but the articles scanned in from 2008-2011 can still be accessed with Google searches.

Here's what Google spokeswoman Maggie Shiels wrote to us about the problem:

The news team have been looking into this issue and are working on addressing it. I just want to let you know that this is not malicious and not being perpetrated by any individual -- this is a technical issue. As you probably know we try really hard to make sure that we give provide the best possible service we can for our users.

Shiels makes it sound as though they've known about the issue for a while. Can it really take Google, of all companies, more than five minutes to fix this?

Secondly, we're not totally buying the "technical issue" story if the implication is that this was generated randomly by a computer.

We wrote back to Shiels, seeking clarification of her comments but haven't heard back yet. Maybe she's helping the news team address the issue.

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Ray Stern is the former news editor of Phoenix New Times. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won numerous awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism.