“As soon as you deal with [sex] explicitly, you have to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.” – C.S Lewis

Just a quick post to made a note of a few things.

Since last Friday, I have not heard from Matt Cutts or anyone else at Google about the quirks that I and others have noticed in how the Google Suggest search box autofill behaves. But in his note he did say he would pass the info along to the Google Suggest team, so hopefully he or someone else at Google will let us know what’s going on.

Our Google Webmaster Tools have been messed up since Sunday. Specifically the Top Search Queries has not been working. We’ve outages of a day or two before, but never anything like this. Five days and counting…

Yesterday there was an overhaul in returns for [tony comstock] and [comstock films] returns in Google’s blog search results. Until yesterday [tony comstock] and [comstock films] only returned when those strings were headlines and body copy. Now we’re seeing returns when the strings are in blogrolls and comments. Naturally that makes for a lot more search returns. 

This comment cum post from Daniel Brant at Seth’s Finkelstein’s Infothought Blog caught my eye:

This behavior is something I’m seeing only for the home page, and only on Google but not on Yahoo or Live. It happens almost exclusively when the word “wikipedia” is the solitary search term, or maybe this one word and another term that’s also on that page. If you add a third term you begin ranking reasonably well for my home page, presumably because the search is now specific enough to override the filtering.

Daniel’s observation is consistent with my observations on searches for things like [real sex] or [female orgasms] or other strings one might reasonably think would produce some returns for sites offering sexually explicit content. While these search do return one or two sexually explicit returns, if you dig down through the returns, it quickly become apparent that lower relevancy returns on “safe” domain are favored over higher relevancy returns on “unsafe” domains. Clicking though the pages I’ve found various sort of spam and and even pedophilia trolls on “safe” domains in the first 10 pages. Ick.

But, add a third term, like [real couples sex] or [real female orgasms] and the floodgates of filth open up. Not only are there sites with explicit content on the first page, but there they are on the second, fifth, tenth, etc. Apparently  people who type two words don’t want sexually explicit returns, but people who type in three words do. Fascinating! 

Over in the comments at Ms.Naughty’s Blog, Amber Rhea is wondering why Google Suggest doesn’t her name, since “none of my sites are porn sites.” Sorry Amber. You don’t get to decide. Google decides. It’s probably some combination of the words you use  and the company you keep, so if you want Google to take you off the Secret Sexual No-Fly List, it would probably be a good idea to stop link to, accepting links from, and commenting on sites like mine or Ms. Naughty’s.

Speaking of words, Amber and anyone else who doesn’t want Google to put their home on the internet on their secret list will probably want to have a look at Googles Banned Words, and remove them from your site ASAP!

No grand wrap up. Just wanted to get these things down before I forgot them.

—–

In the work, a longer post about how computers work tentatively titled “Does the Googlebot Have Asperger’s Sydrome?”

Yeah, I know, that’s a rather provocative title, and as someone who has (what I consider positive) personality traits that run into the subjective margin between healthy and off-kilter, I’m struggling with how to express what I think are some valid questions about how the wholesale movement of our culture into a fully searchable, taxonometric space; especially for ideas that lie at the subjective margins. Finding the right way to talk about people vs things, ideas vs. emotions, etc. is not so easy. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, or make comparisons that are unkind.

In the meanwhile I have this thought about why Google’s taxonomy matters.

The inception of the internet offered people unprecedented direct access to the marketplace of ideas, and no where has this been more apparent than in the way that sexual culture has flourished online. That freedom has been a huge part of what has made this strange thing Peggy and I call Comstock Films possible. I never even worried about whether or not my films were marketable, let alone whether or not they were “safe”, or whether or not what I wrote about them was “safe.” I worried about whether or not they were honest, and when I’ve written about my films,  I’ve tried to write about them honestly. I’ve trusted that that would be enough.

–

Computers may never be able to decide whether Stargate Atlantic is science fiction or science fantasy, but in the end it doesn’t matter.  The Stargate Atlantis DVD box set doesn’t get moved to a special “unsafe” corner of the internet based on how the Googlebot’s algorithm classifies the show’s website.

There’s is no such privilege for artists who address sex. Artist who address subject of the human sexual experience  in the digital realm do so under the threat of being banished into some sort of digital ghetto.

And as our culture moves headlong into the digital realm, the job of the censors only becomes easier. No longer must a work be “taken as a whole” for judgements to be made. Like the the moralist of old, who dogeared a few juicy passages, then dragged writers and publishers to courts; today’s digital censors – Google, St. Bearnard, ACMA, others – pluck a few keywords from a website to render their verdict – unsafe. 

Unsafe.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Censorship, google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.