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Story URL: http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39120280,00.htm

Jew Watch site drops from Google
More accident than censorship…

By David Becker

Published: Tuesday 27 April 2004

Controversial anti-Semitic website Jew Watch has disappeared from Google, but the search site says it had nothing to do with it –despite calls for the company to remove the offending site from its results.

As of Monday only an old image of the Jew Watch site could be found from a Google search on 'Jew', buried five pages within the search results.

A Google spokesman attributed the change to a combination of timing and web hosting policies. The account for Stormfront, a neo-Nazi site that had supported Jew Watch, apparently was cancelled last week by web hosting service EV1 and the site was inaccessible for several days.

Jew Watch has since resurfaced on another hosting service, but its downtime coincided with the periodic "crawls" Google makes to ensure that web addresses are valid. For now, Jew Watch doesn't exist as far as Google is concerned - at least until the company does another crawl in a month or so.

The spokesman said: "Our crawler was unable to reach the site while it was offline, so it dropped from our index. If they remain online over the next month, it's likely we'll pick it up again."

David Becker writes for News.com