It’s been a Google-heavy week here at Rough Type, and that seems to be continuing.

Late last year, in offering some predictions for 2006, I wrote, “The culture wars [will] slam into the internet, as a group of influential evangelicals launch a boycott of Google, demanding that it ‘stop distributing pornography’ through its search engine.” That hasn’t happened yet, but it may have gotten closer yesterday when a New York legislator filed a suit against Google accusing the company of promoting “obscene content,” including child pornography. The suit even ties the porn issue to China’s dealings with China.

The complaint, as Cnet reports, states: “Defendant is willing to accede to the demands of the Chinese autocrats to block the search term ‘democracy,’ but when it comes to the protection and well-being of our nation’s innocent children, Defendant refuses to spend a dime’s worth of resources to block child pornography from reaching children.” Google has responded that it actively removes child pornography from its search engine and advertising network whenever it discovers it.

Whatever the fate of this particular suit, which may be more a political stunt than anything else, the issue of the role of search engines in distributing content that groups of citizens find offensive or even abhorrent is not going to go away. The internet is in the mainstream now, and search engines will not be exempt from society’s norms and controversies.