Google results claim that the Holocaust didn't happen, and company won't change it

The company only makes changes to its results in very specific cases, like when a law is being broken

Journalists visit the information center of the Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on May 6, 2005 in Berlin, Germany (Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

Google's search results currently tell people that the Holocaust didn't happen, and aren't going to be changed.

Searching for "did the holocaust happen" on Google brings up a first result from Stormfront, the neo-Nazi website. The title of the piece is "Top 10 reasons why the holocaust didn't happen", and anyone clicking through sees a list of

Those proclaimed reasons include a suggestion that since "there were survivors", nobody can have been killed in the supposedly fictional mass execution of Jews during the Second World War.

The result is just one of a range of answers pointed out in reports earlier this week, which also include anti-Semitic pages that are returned for the search "are jews evil". But Google says that it is not going to change the results to reflect the truth and to remove the results from popping up.

“We are saddened to see that hate organizations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in search results does not mean that Google endorses these views,” a Google spokesperson told Quartz.

Instead, the results come from the company's successful and usually helpful algorithm, which trawls through websites using an algorithm that works out which is most likely to be a helpful answer to people's search.

“We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware, and violations of our webmaster guidelines,” the spokesperson said.

Google's search results help promote sites that then gain followers, and those followers and readers help push those sites further up in Google's algorithm and make them more likely to show to readers.

Bing, Google's main competitor, shows primarily truthful and non-racist results for answers to the same question.