Posts Tagged ‘search engines’

Searching for Religion

Thursday, January 28th, 2010 by JEL

People search for religion in many ways. They sample different neighborhood churches. They survey friends and try to find some overlap. They read books. And think. And, I guess, they also use the Internet. It’s hard to imagine looking for life meaning in the search box at Google or Yahoo!, but there are advertisers betting their dollars that some people will.

I was on Yahoo! News earlier today, poking through the news, feeling sad about Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger, and almost randomly typed in “religion” in the box. I wasn’t interested in the natural search results, but instead, the sponsored (paid for) results. They were:

I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting clip art. The last one is very mysterious. It takes you to a site called Jesus 2020 and I’m not sure to what the year refers. The whole goal seemed to get you to click the big yellow “YES” button. I did not. The copyright belongs to “Global Media Outreach” which sounds kind of scary.