While Google’s new algorithms are doing their best to kill off small technology sites in favour of bigger more general magazines, the outfit is defending its right to promote extremist sites.

For the last two weeks site traffic to non-mainstream sites has fallen as Google has stopped referring people on its news pages. However at the same time Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has said that he will not take down terrorist-sympathising websites from his search engines.

This weekend MPs, including the Labour politician Paul Flynn, called on the company to prevent searches listing sites for groups such as the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab. However Schmidt said that Google cannot identify evil and take it down. It has to take the decision that information if it's legal, even if it's despicable, will be indexed.

He claimed that extremists are usually possible to detect through their internet activity and that their online presence can sometimes help.