Seven Things Google Doesn’t Mind You Searching For
Everybody in the sex blogging and porn worlds has been coping with Google’s bizarre double standards for quite a while — the weirdly bigoted and anti-sex list of stop words and filter words that they use to partially disable portions of their various search services, even when you’ve set your search preferences to disable filtering. Meanwhile, of course, they seem to apply no similar filters to the realms of drugs, war, violence, bloodshed, mayhem, or serial killers. That’s all cool.
Naw, I’m not bitter.
Well, just in the last few days they added a couple of software companies to a couple of their filter lists. Distributed file sharing is now, like sex, a burdened classification when it comes to Google searches. Kidnapping and making bombs, though? Still good!
The graphics above are ruthlessly ganked from a large and well-presented infographic at this link:
Google Censoring Torrent Search Suggestions: 7 Terrible Things They Don’t Censor
And now, I’m going to slide out with a little favorite of my own: Jeffery Dahmer versus Violet Blue. Take it away, cannibal king!
I don’t care how deliberate it is, when you look at a search like that, you’ve got to conclude that Google is broken.
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=6469
This is what aggravates me all the time. Why are there “blood-porns” like “Saw”, where they can show a man’s entrails all over the place and it gets an R rating. But, if you show a man’s erect penis, too much penis, or talk too much about penis, it automatically gets NC-17, and can’t be distributed.
I find this double-standard more irritating when I think of the consequences of this kind of censorship. We know that desensitization to violence often leads to violent behavior. That puts society at risk. But really, is desensitization to sexuality really that harmful? I mean nobody ever goes on a shooting rampage from being too horny.
I rest my case.
I don’t know what you are doing wrong. But I get LOTS of relevant results when I type in Violet Blue, Bittorent etc.
Tom, it’s what you’re doing wrong.
You’re confusing the full-on search (after you type in the full search term and hit return) with the various search accelerator services.
Google isn’t filtering any of this stuff out of the actual results. What they are doing is pre-filtering it out of search autocomplete (filling in the search for you as you type) and whatever they are calling the search results that begin to appear on the page as you type before you’ve hit the search button.
There’s no reason for doing this in a world where they have filtering preferences that users can set, and have set.
To me this is a storm in a teacup. So, Google is hampering the lazy. Type the whole word and you get the search. Google is free. You get what you pay for. In this case you get whatever they feel like doing.
This annoys me to no end, but I just realized why it annoys me even more today. I turned off the instant search awhile ago since if I’m searching for something there’s a good chance it will be sex related. It is my job after all. Side note: I’m also unsearchable on instant.
But the reason it really really annoys me is because I normally search in the little google search box in my toolbar. I didn’t even notice until today that it’s been censoring my searches when it predicts my terms. And I’m hesitant to turn it off since half the reason I use it is to spell check words.
Also, I’ve always said that I rather a child walk in on two people making passionate love to each other than beating each other. I mean which one is more likely to actually screw them up?
Well, Joyce, I saw both as a kid, unfortunately, and I’d say that the sex scarred me a lot more. Considering it gave me a pathological fear of men. That I didn’t get over until after the end of highschool.
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Sorry but I support Goggle on this one.
1) It’s their service and no one is making you use it.
2) They are not censoring your search just not helping you search for those terms by autocompleting a term that MIGHT be searched by someone who does not want sex related content (ie not everyone expects or wants to see “violet blue” pop up a sex blog)
3) While it is tempting to believe Goggle provides a “service” they actually are in the business to make money. Frankly do you really want them to help you dig into the soft underbelly of sleaze – and then keep track of every kinky search so they can sell it to the highest bidder? Personally I try to avoid using Goggle for searching for things I wouldn’t ask my mother about. I rather appreciate Goggle’s attempt to help keep my public personna less encumbered by autocompleted kinky searches.
(That said I do rely on a bunch of hardworking people like Bacchus to find and provide the links to all that’s erotic, naughty, and salubriously kinky on the net – Thank you!)
Peter, that’s two straw men and a bizarre attempt to map your preferences on to the rest of the world.
I never said anybody was making me use the service. I’m criticizing the cultural values of the folks who offer it. I’m saying their values strike me as fucked up.
I never said my searches were being censored, although that word has been used by others. I personally consider censorship to be a state function, and I never apply the term to corporate action.
And, yes, I really do want Google to help me search for the things I’m trying to search for. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be trying to search for those things. The privacy implications are what they are, but having the search be broken — and seeing it ignore the filtering choices that I indicate in the settings Google allows me to set — doesn’t make the privacy problems any better.
I genuinely don’t understand why Google should be thought to be beyond criticism here, just because their service is free or because use of it is voluntary. If the service has default settings that are technically broken (disregarding user preference settings) or open to criticism on moral or ethical grounds, what’s wrong with raising those legitimate criticisms?
[…] noticed how harshly porn sites are penalized in the search algorithms lately? Remember when they started filtering Violet Blue out of the autocomplete search dropdowns? Or decided that there’s no such thing as a […]
[…] a early example, consider this post from 2011, in which I visually documented how Google’s then-new(ish) autocomplete service (sometimes […]