Censorship

Something that's always bugged me a little are the censorship functions on search engines, those righteous little options with names like 'Family Filter' or 'Safe Search'. Little munchkin hats for search engines to tip at puritans. I dont think it's good to blinker people so that they can maintain a fantasy of living in some 1950s white picket fence world, better to expose people to the real world so they can love life for what it really is.

Anyhoo, so I wrote a script to search both with and without the family filtering, and then return only those results that are 'potentially offensive'. I was amazed. Google's SafeSearch(tm) is one wacky piece of kit. Offensive inappropriate pages it's protecting people from include The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, The UN International Court of Justice and this Wikipedia article about kittens. There were also a few consipracy kook sites about secret government censorship, happy crazy irony there, slightly more profound, the Feminists Against Censorship was taken out of the 'safe' results. Hmmm...

Of course, the script has practical uses as well, it produces near perfect adult searches, uncluttered by irrelvant vanilla stuff. Just the thing when you're googling for... um... treasure. Porntastic!

script here. go play...

Created 2005-09-04 23:53:00 by 195 and filed under introspection