( CNN ) -- Former U.S. Sen. and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has a well-known Google problem . For the uninitiated , if you Google Santorum 's name , the first result you 'll probably get is not his personal website but a fake definition of `` santorum , '' a sexual byproduct that 's a bit too graphic to talk about in detail here . ( Of course , you can Google him and easily find out . ) We 'll get into how that all happened in a second , but here 's what 's new : On Tuesday , the socially conservative politician lashed out at Google , saying the company could get rid of the sexual references to his name on the search results if it wanted to -- and perhaps would do so if he were a Democrat . `` I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden , they 'd get rid of it , '' he told Politico . `` If you 're a responsible business , you do n't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country . '' He continued : `` 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 ca n't handle , but I suspect that 's not true . '' Santorum contacted Google and asked the company about the issue , Politico said . In an e-mail to CNN , a Google spokeswoman said , `` Google 's search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web . Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly . Once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web , it will be removed from Google 's search results through our usual crawling process . '' She added : `` We do not remove content from our search results , except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines . '' Santorum is just the latest to gripe at Google over how it ranks search results . The CEO of Yelp posted a blog Tuesday saying that Google purposefully ranks its own products -- like Google Places -- above its competitors . `` We believe Google has acted anti-competitively in at least two key ways : by misusing Yelp review content in their competing Places product and by favoring their own competing Places product in search results , '' Yelp 's Jeremy Stoppelman wrote . Google CEO Eric Schmidt was scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday about similar antitrust complaints . The lewd `` santorum '' definition popped up after the former senator compared homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press : . `` In every society , the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality , '' he said . `` That 's not to pick on homosexuality . It 's not , you know , man on child , man on dog , or whatever the case may be . '' That angered gay rights supporters , including gay podcast host and sex columnist Dan Savage , who launched a campaign for his listeners to redefine Santorum 's name . Savage created a website to promote the winning definition ( again , you 'll have to search for that elsewhere ) , and enough bloggers linked to it that the spoof site eventually eclipsed Santorum 's campaign website in search rankings . Danny Sullivan , who writes at the blog SearchEngineLand , notes that Google has a history of being hands-off when it comes to these controversies , regardless of the politics or sensitivities involved : . `` Google is loathe to touch its results in any way , shape or form . That 's because if it does intervene in any way , there 's some interest group that will immediately claim a bias . Way back in 2004 , an anti-Jewish web site started ranking in Google 's top results for 'Jew . ' `` Despite Google co-founder Sergey Brin being Jewish and himself disgusted with the result , it stood . Intervention , when Google 's ranking algorithms had spoken , was seen as harmful to user trust , '' Sullivan writes . In December 2009 , when racist images of first lady Michelle Obama popped to the top of Google search results , the company took a similar free-speech stance . `` We have a bias toward free expression , '' Google spokesman Scott Rubin said at the time . `` That means that some ugly things will show up . '' Still , Google has removed offensive content from searches , usually by making changes to how its overall search equations function . In 2007 , for example , a change to Google 's search algorithm stopped the search term `` miserable failure '' from directing Internet users to pages about former president George W. Bush , according to SearchEngineLand . It 's worth noting that some of these Internet weirdnesses have shown up on other search engines , too , not just on Google . What do you think about the Santorum situation ? Should Google make changes ? Or is the company right to stand by the way its equations rank Web pages against each other , by trying to judge their relevance ?
Politico : Rick Santorum asks readers to change the search results for his name . A reference to a sex byproduct shows up high in search results for ` ` santorum '' A sex blog uses a spoof page to draw readers away from Santorum 's page . Googe typically does not alter its search results because of this .