Comments on: Penis Versus Clitoris: Google Has Decided

By: Red Witch

Red Witch — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:48:11 +0000

Angela Caperton did a post on Google as the “inescapable and ruthless arbiter of puritanical morality” after my blog had a Content Warning splash page imposed on it. (“Google says: Sexy Witches Are BAD!”) She linked to this post and I followed her links here.

While I am here I’d just like to say, “Damn Google sucks!” Not very articulate, I know, but articulate text and tasteful images didn’t save me from “the Walmart of the internet” so why bother with niceties.

I had never explored the strictest of Google’s internet filters and am aghast at all it excludes. Now I can’t help wondering what constitutes “moderate filtering”: clitoris is not excluded, and neither is any other word I can think of. What exactly, then, does it filter out?

By: Svetlana Ivanova

Svetlana Ivanova — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:52:56 +0000

This is ominous.

By: Rach

Rach — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:30:16 +0000

never mind on the thing above- i was looking at the autofill rather than the safesearch. safesearch still does allow penis but not clitoris. which is ridiculous.

the autofill thing’s ridiculous too though.

By: Rach

Rach — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:15:55 +0000

You know what’s exceptionally ridiculous about this whole thing? It’s encouraging bad spelling! Horrible spelling!

Clitoris has no hits, but the incorrect “clitorus” has many!

and the thing that really gets me- zack and miri make a porno doesn’t bring up a single hit, yet somehow, zack and miri make a “prono” brings up 2,630,000. WHAT THE HELL GOOGLE?

i will say though- at this time, when i typed in penis, it didn’t bring up any safesearch results. maybe they fixed it after the outcry from the community? -shrug-

By: Bacchus

Bacchus — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:20:32 +0000

Rather, I think, “clitori” is not on the banned words list.

By: cosmicdan

cosmicdan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:15:45 +0000

I too, got no response from Google when I typed in the word “clitoris” in the search box. But when I left off the final “s” there were many sites available. Maybe Google thinks that clitoris is a plural?

By: Bacchus

Bacchus — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:02:08 +0000

Martin, no, the Google image search uses a completely different database. They have an image search filter but it doesn’t work very well, due to the fact that it’s very hard (close to impossible with current tech) to automatically categorize images.