Rick Santorum is fighting a losing battle and it isn't the GOP Presidential race. The former Senator from Pennsylvania is losing out to Google.

For those who aren't aware, typing in "Rick Santorum" into a Google search will net you results that aren't fit for publication. The link has been on top of the Google search results for some time now and has been the subject of comedians' barbs. The issue was only recently raised again after Santorum gave an interview with the website Politico last week. The Senator blamed Google for not changing the results when it had the power to do so.

"I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they'd get rid of it," Santorum said. "If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country."

"To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their Web site or through their system is something that they say they can't handle, but I suspect that's not true," Santorum added.

Google has responded by saying the Santorum should contact the webmaster of the site directly and not blame the search giant.

"Google's search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web," the company explained. "We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines."

"Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly," the company wrote. "Once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web, it will be removed from Google's search results through our usual crawling process."

Even if Santorum contacted the webmaster of the offending site it wouldn't do much good. Dan Savage the editorial director of Seattle weekly The Stranger, created the site after Santorum made offensive remarks about homosexuality. Savage soon asked "computer geeks to move my definition of santorum to the top slot on Google," and it worked.

"No money changed hands," Savage wrote in February. "We didn't pay Google a thing. Spreading Santorum rose through the Google ranks on links-and-merit alone."

Savage said Santorum's complaints about the search results are just sour grapes. "This from the man who compared people in stable, loving same-sex relationships to dog f***ers and kiddie rapists, this from a man who would make gay and straight sodomy illegal, ban gay marriage and any other protections for same-sex couples, and prevent loving same-sex couples from adopting children who need homes."

While Savage's opinions on Santorum are interesting from a narrative perspective, the real debate should be on whether Google's algorithm could benefit from more human interaction. What exactly drives the internal metrics that Google is so proud of?