‘Political arm of the IRA’: Google’s take on Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin says it is looking to change the text of its website's Google search preview, which says the party is considered the "political arm of the IRA".

A site preview, or “snippet”, is the text underneath a website’s name in a list of Google search results.

The current text describing the official Sinn Féin website says: "Irish republican party seeking to end British rule in Northern Ireland. Led by Gerry Adams. Considered to be the political arm of the IRA."

A spokeswoman for the party said it was not aware of the summary when contacted by The Irish Times.

“We note from Google that the meta description is automatically generated,” she said in a statement.

She confirmed Sinn Féin believes the description is not an accurate summary of the party and that it would seek to have it removed or changed by Google.

The text had been brought to the attention of the party’s webmaster, who is “currently following it up”.

Google controls all site previews and although the text can be influenced by adding keywords and descriptions to a page, it cannot be written by the website itself.

A spokeswoman for Google said in many cases the text is derived from the Open Directory Project (ODP), a user-generated online encyclopedia.*

Although users cannot directly write their site’s own snippet, there are technical ways to block the use of ODP information.

*This article was edited on 14/09/2015