I still have some qualms about the whole idea behind Cathoogle (censoring sites so that sites that that conform to your church’s ideology are preferenced), but that’s my bug, not theirs. Ultimately, I will be curious to see whether the search engine really gets a lot of traffic from Catholics, or whether they will use their own minds to sift through the available information.

And I should mention this is nothing against Catholics in that respect. I’d have similar troubles with Baptist Google or Mormon Google or Liberal Google or Conservative Google.

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Tom Henegan has contacted the owner of CatholicGoogle, the search engine that gives higher authority to Catholic web sites and filters out pr0n. He picks up on the question I asked about CG in an earlier post:

Some bloggers have asked if this site violates the Google trademark. “I’m in the process of speaking with them,” Mulhern said, adding he was dealing with Google in the United States. “I’ve asked whether they object to the name.” Just in case they do, he has been thinking about alternatives. “We’re thinking of changing the name of the website to something more catchy,” he said. “We might put out a poll.”

My question was not so much a real question, but more rhetorical in that I knew the answer ahead of time. Yes, CatholicGoogle violates Google’s trademark. Given Google’s frequently stated aim to provide the best search results, CatholicGoogle dilutes their brand in a big way. An Internet beginner wouldn’t be as quick as a netizen to be able to distinguish between Google and a knockoff.

I’m glad Mulhern is looking into changing the name of his site. Maybe he could call it “CatholicSearch” or something.

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I’m interested in seeing how long it takes this web site to change its name. According to the site’s disclaimer:

Catholic search engine powered by Google striving to provide an easy to use resource to anyone wanting to learn more about Catholicism and provide a safer way for good Catholics to surf the web.

CatholicGoogle is powered by Google using “safe search” technology, it produces results from all over the internet with more weighting to given to Catholic websites and eliminates the vast majority of unsavoury content, such as pornography. The site is not associated or affiliated with Google.com, we work closely with Google to help ensure that the adverts are not objectionable in nature, however, some of the results and adverts that are displayed may not be in line with Catholic doctrine and we do not endorse of any of the results or adverts displayed on Catholic Google.

Look, if you’re interested in walling off the Internet from a certain set of religiously minded patrons, that’s fine. But you can’t use the name of a company to brand your particular form of Internet censorship. Not only does CatholicGoogle use Google’s name, but they co-opt their distinctive color scheme as well.

About the only semi-original work on the entire logo is the halos, and I bet that took all of two minutes to draw upon that cliche’d visual imagery. Even if Google doesn’t come after CatholicGoogle with a platoon of lawyers – which they might not, given the inevitable PR headaches that would spur – CG should do the right thing and stop mooching on Google’s business brand.

And I’m sort of curious about this part of the CatholicGoogle search filter: “more weighting to given to Catholic websites…” Is there something inherent in “Catholic” web sites that make them more credible than “non-Catholic” web sites? Here’s the whois information for CatholicGoogle, which appears to originate from France.

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