Santorum blasts Google for political discrimination

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum expressed annoyance at the continuing graphic sexual terms which accompany Google searches for his name, suggesting that the company discriminates against him because of his conservative beliefs.

"I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they'd get rid of it," Santorum told Politico. "If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country."

"To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can't handle but I suspect that's not true," Santorum said.

A Google search for Rick Santorum turns up graphic results linking Santorum's surname with a sexual act. The ranking was generated after a 2003 campaign launched by gay rights activist Dan Savage in reaction to comments made by Santorum about homosexuality and privacy rights.

It's rare for Google to remove content from its search results. The company says that if a particular website removes a page from the Internet, it will thus get removed from Google's search results through the normal crawling process.

Last month, Santorum complained in an interview with The Hill newspaper that the gay community had "gone out on a jihad" against him for his position against same-sex marriage.