The cyberspace has been evolving every second of our time. Its changes are so fast that at a blink of an eye you will miss it even if it hits you on the forehead. A decade ago, our computer in the seminary has no internet connection of whatsoever and we were using wordstar and lotus then as our word processor. Ten years later, having my own pc and catching up with the technology, the Internet has evolved from a mere information highway to thousands of applications from a single click. And now, even religions are catching up.

CatholicGoogle.com promotes itself as one of the best ways to surf the Internet minus the sex, porn, violence and the likes. But according to Faithworld, its absolutely effective as the bursting fishnets in the Gospel of Luke. Tech crunch has this to say:

“It seems that when it comes to filtering topics beyond the standard “offensive” categories (swear words and sex) , CatholicGoogle only serves to make queries potentially more offensive. A search for “drunk” yields a video of “Drunk Catholic Kids”. Perhaps even more bizarre: a search for “sex” offers an article bashing the Church’s stance on sexuality (they may have included this in the results for a balanced alternative perspective, but I doubt it). It’s as if the site just appends the word “Catholic” to whatever you’re searching for and crosses its fingers.”

Tom Heneghan, the Faithworld Blogger, in an interview with the CatholicGoogle’s creator told in an interview that the search engine is no way related to google itself and that the site actually failed to filter some objectionable and offensive content on the web. In a Phone interview with Reuters, NCR said in their blog that Catholic Google webmaster Paul Mulhern admitted that some offensive contents are slipping through, in the advertisements that are automatically generated by Google websites when a search is initiated. He added:

“We’re in the process of trying to eliminate as much of the unsavory adverts as possible, but they have to be blocked by domain name, which is why it is taking some time.”

Aside from the Catholic Google.com, there are also other religion-influence search engine on the net like MuslimGoogle.Com and the Jewgle. But they both fail to offer quality searches.

As of this writing, CatholicGoogle.com stats has grown to 16,000 hits per day and its still growing. The webmaster have already sent a letter to Google asking if they have objections about the use of Google’s nameand Logo. Up to now, Google has not yet responded.

Though I think Paul Mulhern’s noble purpose is to aid Catholic Parents in filtering the search engines for their children, yet, Catholic Google will not achieve total filtration of contents even with the smallest offensive word, for not all results containing those offensive words are bad and not all articles that have no offensive words are good. In short, it’s impossible to tell if one search result is bad or not for the children. Though it can be a useful tool someday, but what like NCR said, it should never be used as a replacement for other effective Internet filter programs on the net.

I appreciate and really commend Paul Mulhern for this noble project, but to actually save the internet from evil is a mere impossibility. We can only rely on our own responsibility of shunning away from offensive and damaging websites because like in real life, the Internet is full of both goodness and evil combined. It will only boils down on choosing between the two.

As people continue to reinvent and innovate the internet, we may somehow see in the near future, Google being divided into sections and factions: LesbianGoogle.com, BlondeGoogle.com, BisayaGoogle.com, MidgetsGoogle.com, PetloversGoogle.com and so on and so forth. Actually I am predicting that there will be more Google Search Engine clones in the future than the actual number of search engine results themselves.

*My gratitude and apology to Tom Heneghan of Reuters for the corrections