Archive for the ‘google’ Category

Google says the removal of clitoris from SafeSearch results is a “technical issue”.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

From Simon Blake’s blog:

In November I posted a comment saying I was writing to google to ask why clitoris was banned from in their safe search option when penis and scrotum were not.  Last week someone called to say it was a technical issue and they were going to look into it.  He agreed to contact me when it was sorted.  I will keep you informed.

Three cheers for Simon for following up on this. But a “technical issue” strikes me as an odd way to characterize Google’s decision to include “clitoris” on a list of SafeSearch banned words that also includes “nude’, ‘naked’, and ‘bastard’.

Of course maybe it is a technical issue. After all, the mere misplacement of a ‘/’ caused Google to classify every page on the World Wide Web as malware. Here’s hoping Google can get its bugs ironed out. If they do, maybe people will be able to use Google to find out the [clitoris] vs. [penis] story started right here on this blog.

This Site May Harm Your Computer (Another product of Google’s laziness?)

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

“Sergei didn’t know HTML, and he really wasn’t all that interested in learning. What he was really passionate about doing was building a search engine, was building a product that worked. And so he put together the homepage as a way to get the service up and running as quickly as possible. In many ways the Google homepage that you see today – in some respects you could claim that it was almost a happy byproduct of laziness on his part.” – Jen Fitzpatrick, Engineering Director, from her presentation, “The Science and Art of the User Experience at Google.”

It’s getting to the point where I can almost guess when there’s going to be some sort of Google weirdness. In the last few days I’ve seen bunch of significant shifts shifts in how the Googlebot regards ComstockFilms.com; the sort of early warning tremors I’ve got in the habit of looking out for (and dreading.)

Well this morning the earthquake hit. As of 10AM EST, Google is showing the “This site may harm your computer” warning on all search returns. Not all search returns for [comstock films]. Not all search returns for sex related searches. All search returns.

Two years ago, when the Google sex search bug story broke, I read more than a few snarky remarks from folks who were dismissive of the various concerns raised about how much economic and social power was vested in Google’s algorithm.  ”What did you expect? You think about sex too much. Don’t be surprised when it bites you on the ass.”

Two years later this is a topic of conversation on the cover of The Atlantic magazine, with leading thinkers pondering what the homogenization of the internet, with Google as its ultimate and unrivaled gatekeeper.

As to the Google’s laziness business; that’s not my description, that’s Googles — straight out of a lecture from a Google senior engineer. The YouTube clip is embedded above. I first posted it in my rant about difference between Google SafeSearch results for [clitoris] vs. the SafeSearch results for [penis]. If you didn’t watch it then, maybe take a few minutes to watch it now. Google, an operation that is self-described as a “product of laziness” is the ultimate arbiter of the internet, and this morning we’re all malware.

UPDATE:

Here’s Google’s explanation:

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.

Think on that for a moment. An errant bit of data entry and Google blacklisted the entire internet. Yes, it was caught and corrected in minutes. But still, a misplaced ‘/’ and the entire internet turns into malware?

“The Google God wields great power over commerce.” – Seth Finkelstein

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

This morning brings a nice column from Seth Finkelstein in The Guardian about sex, search, and “content filtering.” What I appreciate about Seth’s point of view is that he’s got deep expertise in the nuts and bolts of how these things work, he’s not given to conspiracy theories, but doesn’t give an inch to the powers that be.  He’s also a lucid and entertaining writer, with a sense of humor as dry as a leaf in Winter:

Real sex is difficult for the Googlebot. If humans argue so much about distinguishing between erotica and pornography, imagine the difficulty search algorithms have with the topic. Two years ago, an admitted bug in a change to Google’s ranking algorithm caused many respected and popular sexuality-related sites to suddenly lose their rank in search results. The bug was soon fixed, but not before it had made Google’s treatment of sexual material into a prominent issue.

Although such events often spawn theories about political motivations, the explanation is almost always along the lines of a problem with Google’s spam-filtering; instances of governmental censorship of search engines in western countries are very rare. As porn is one of the most popular subjects for spam, legitimate writers concerned with sexual topics can find themselves filtered out as collateral damage.

I don’t expect Google’s much-celebrated algorithm would have any better luck with the Erotic vs Porngraphy question then we mere humans, but one would hope it would at least be able to distiguish between the internet’s honest participants and bad actors. Sadly, a Google-search like ["bill and desiree"] doesn’t give me much hope; Google ranks stolen torrents of our just released Bill and Desiree: Love is Timeless pages ahead of our own efforts to promote and sell the film on the web.

Of course I would suppose there are those who would argue that whether Google’s efforts represent a war on spam, a war on pornography, or a war on sex, it’s a war worth winning, and the harm to Comstock Films, if not intended, still falls in the realm of “acceptable losses”; that the suppression of Comstock Films that’s taken place over the last two years in Google’s search returns is an unintended, but inevitable side effect of Google’s larger efforts “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As Seth puts it – collateral damage.

We’ve made every effort we can to make Google (and the rest of the world) aware of the effect of the New Searchable Era ™ and the Complaint Driven Internet ™ on our ablity to continue to make the films we make, but for us, things are getting worse, not better.  I sometimes imagine (sardonically) a Google senior engineer watching our site sink in their rankings, shaking his head and muttering “poor bastards”; like we were a company sent on a suicide mission for the greater good of the battle. (No one’s ever accused me of not having an over-inflated sense of self-importance.)

Of course what you think is important is a product of your values and your point of view. More than once I’ve been accused of merely arguing for my own self-interest. As a Madisonian, that accusation has always left me puzzled. Who’s interest am I supposed to be arguing? And never minding that, doesn’t the minority point of view have a vital role to play in a pluralistic democracy? But perhaps I flatter myself too much. Returning to Seth, who’s more temperate:

It’s become almost a cliche to point out that algorithmic choices made by search engines represent social values. But different factions care about different values, as demonstrated in the case of complex topics such as sex. As more groups begin to see how Google’s determinations affect their own interests, we’ll likely see repeated outrage from people newly arrived to these debates.

Here in the US these “filtering” debates seem confined to sex, and for the most part people can go about their daily lives untroubled, unaware even, of what they do or do not see. No one’s life depends on whether they find their way to ComstockFilms.com and and are exposed to our point of view on the collision of sex and the moving image, so for now I suppose to most people the debate seems frivilous, and perhaps, given the focus on sex, a little unseemly. I don’t expect to see the level of energy and outrage these same questions have provoked in the UK, or Australia, or China unless or until everyday people feel like they’re losing something important to them.

I sent a note to Seth, thanking him for the article and for mentioning us:

Just read the guardian column. Of course I appreciate the coverage, but the perspective you bring is just as valuable. Today’s Peggy’s birthday and we’ve spent several hours talking about what’s next. More than likely the next project won’t involve sex. I guess we’ve arrived at the same conclusion as Google: it’s just too much trouble.  ;-)

Seth’s reply, droll and understated as usual:

The Google God wields great power over commerce.

And of course commerce wields great power over culture. For every Don Quixote, eager to tilt at windmills, there are thousands of everyday people who just want to peacefully go about their business.

Why does the Google index of my blog stop on Dec. 27, 2006?

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Long time readers know that we’ve had more than our fair share of mishaps with Google. In fairness to Google, the commercialization of sexuality attracts malefactors all out of proportion to the effort it takes separate the wheat from the chaff. But knowing that is cold comfort when your livelihood is on the line.

More over, this New Searchable Era ™ combined with the rise of the Complaint Driven Internet ™ have tipped the balance away from new voices, and  back towards those who seem to take delight in taking offense. I don’t expect we’ll see College Humor videos pulled off YouTube, or James Joyce re-edited for the iPhone App Store, but it’s clear that lessor known writers and filmmakers aren’t given the benefit of the doubt.

When Peggy and I started this Comstock Films thing, the internet was a leg up, a place a the little guy could mount an insurgent campaign against the status quo; a place where a good idea could go around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media and straight to the people who might appreciate it. But increasing the internet is the mainstream media,  with it’s own (mostly automated and mindless) gatekeepers and time again we are finding ourselves shut out. It’s frustrating, and even a little scary.

But because at a certain point making the films we wanted to make required that we go “all in”, we have no real choice but to soldier on. There’s simply too much invested in blood, sweat, and tears to do anything but keep fighting.

I have been wondering for some while why pages that link to my posts, or even pages that steal my post wholesale rank in Google’s search returns, while my original posts are (often) nowhere to be found. Today a clue. 

Since our return, between cleaning the house and returning correspondences that went unanswered while we were away, I’ve been Google-stalking myself. I find that seeing when, why and how people are writing about what we do is a good way to come up with PR ideas. For a reason I’ve already forgotten, I ended up running this search on Google:

blogurl:http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/tony

Apparently the last post in Google’s index of my blog is my post from Dec. 27, 2006 “Will Google Kill Comstock Films?” That’s two years of blogging and something like 300 posts missing from Google’s index. That’s countless hours devoted to creating unique content (i.e. search-bait) that’s not helping our business.

I don’t know what the reasons for this might be. Maybe it’s another Googlebot bug. Maybe we’ve got our Wordpress Update Services misconfigured. (I’ve checked and will ask Peggy to double check when she gets back from the vet.) Maybe it’s sun spots. Maybe it’s because after we broke the Googlebot bug story,  The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films became The Most Dangerous Blog on the Internet ™ . I don’t know. I do know is the timeline is uncanny, so I’ve asked my daughter to get out the Reynolds Wrap and fold us a couple of tinfoil hats.

I also don’t know what the answer is to the question “Will Google Kill Comstock Films?” But on days like today, it sure feels like they’re trying!

We Made Google’s Blacklist, But What About Australia’s?

Monday, December 8th, 2008

As far as Google is concerned, ComstockFilms.com is a dirty domain. Google search result bring up people linking to my posts ahead of the posts themselves, they even rank spamblogs that scrape our content ahead of our pages; and it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot we can do about it. So it goes in the New Searchable Era

Meanwhile, we’re on pins and needles to see if we can make Australia’s 10,000 domain blacklist.  We’ve already had our films banned from film festivals by the OFLC, maybe we can get banned from the Australian internet in Australia too. . Woo friggin hoo.

In consultations with ISPs, concerns have been raised that filtering a blacklist beyond 10 000 URLs may raise network performance issues, depending on the configuration of the filter. The pilot will therefore seek to also test network performance against a test list of 10 000 URLs.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~frankfil/Internet%20filtering%20letter.pdf

Remember, if you haven’t done anything wrong (or voiced a controversial opinion) you’ve got nothing to worry about. The OFLC, Google, and YouTube just want to keep things Safe.

YouTube Removes Bill & Desiree Trailer for TOS Violation

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Yesterday we put up a trailer for Bill and Desiree on our YouTube account. Today YouTube deleted the video for a TOS violation. Here’s the trailer, off our own server:

 

Here’s a College Humor clip from YouTube.com that’s received over 4,000,000 views:

This is what YouTube has to say about sexuality and nudity:

YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it’s a video of yourself, don’t post it on YouTube.

Most nudity is not allowed, particularly if it is in a sexual context. Generally if a video is intended to be sexually provocative, it is less likely to be acceptable for YouTube. There are exceptions for some educational, documentary and scientific content, but only if that is the sole purpose of the video and it is not gratuitously graphic. For example, a documentary on breast cancer would be appropriate, but posting clips out of context from the documentary might not be.

Of course anyone who’s clicked around YouTube knows there are all sorts of “sexy” video clips on YouTube, so before we put up the trailer we clicked around a little to get an idea of where YouTube draws the line. Here’s a little of what we found.

A bit from a Lindsey Lohan movie:

 

At the end of the Lohan clip, YouTube suggest we might be interested in this Japanese schoolgirl fetishist clip:

 

At the end of the quasi-pedophiliac video, YouTube thought we might be interested in a little sex ed:

 

Then YouTube thought a testicular exam was in order:

 

And then finally this clip, mislabeled “Britney Sex Tape”:

 

After watching the above clips, you might feeling a little confused about what is and is not acceptable on YouTube. The trailer for “Bill and Desire” does not show full nudity. There are no female nipples shown, and the swell of Desiree’s breast is barely discernible between her and Bill’s bodies. There is no pubic hair and no genitals. There are no buttocks or ass-cracks. In short, there is no objective difference in the degree of nudity shown in the trailer for “Bill and Desiree” and these other clips that YouTube is hosting. But YouTube has an answer:

Please take these rules seriously and take them to heart. Don’t try to look for loopholes or try to lawyer your way around the guidelines—just understand them and try to respect the spirit in which they were created.

That clears it right up, doesn’t it. Like YouTube’s parent company Google, YouTube favors pranksterism over candor. The College Humor clip shows just as much skin as our trailer, but it’s meant as a joke, so that a-okay. Lindsey Lohan’s orgasmic moaning and groaning is okay because we know she’s faking it. The pedophiliac fetish schoolgirl clip – even the part with “POV” intercourse between the videographer and the model – is okay because she’s wearing white cotton panties and covering her breasts with her hands. The penile exam clip is just fine because it’s medical.

Oh, speaking of medical, next month “Bill and Desiree” will be playing for faculty and clinicians at the Martha Stewart Center for Center for Living at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center.

A Product of Laziness (Jen Fitzpatrick Explains Google)

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

“Sergei didn’t know HTML, and he really wasn’t all that interested in learning. What he was really passionate about doing was building a search engine, was building a product that worked. And so he put together the homepage as a way to get the service up and running as quickly as possible. In many ways the Google homepage that you see today – in some respects you could claim that it was almost a happy byproduct of laziness on his part.” – Jen Fitzpatrick, Engineering Director, from her presentation, “The Science and Art of the User Experience at Google.”

The title of this blog is “The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films”. The reason I chose this title is because after 20 years of being a commercial artist, I’ve come to believe you can’t understand why someone makes the art the make without understanding the environment in which they do their art-making.

The writing on this blog has tried explain the commercial, legal and social environment within which erotic films are made as a way of trying to explain why most films dealing with explicit erotic subject matter have such easily identified characteristics, both technically and in their thematic approach to the material.

I’ve written about the tools that are used.  I’ve written about the underlying economics. I’ve written about the legal and quasi-legal limitations on distribution. I’ve written about the misinformation that is endlessly promulgated when mainstream media outlets try to sex-up their pages with porn stories.

When I uncovered the shocking disparity between how Google’s [SafeSearch] filter treat [penis] vs how it treats [clitoris] and words that it finds problematic has made me curious about environment under which the SafeSearch filter was create. How was it that Google so cavalierly discard [clitoris]? How is it that this has gone addressed? How do the attitudes about sexuality that can be inferred though such an omission effect other aspects of Google business operation?

Viewed through that lens, this presentation from Jen Fitzpatrick, an Engineering Director at Google. is instructive.

The Science and Art of User Experience at Google

I think it’s also useful to reread this passage from Matt Cutts blog. Matt Cutts is the Google engineer who wrote SafeSearch, and now heads Google webspam team:

“As the head of Google’s webspam team, I prowl around some pretty hairy places on the internet. Almost every day I encounter hacked pages, malware, porn, and generally scuzzy pages. The security model in Google Chrome is much stronger than most other browsers I’ve used. I’ve surfed through hundreds of seedy back alleys of the Internet over the last several months, and Google Chrome has safely kept me from being infected or affected by the junky web pages I encounter.” (emphasis mine)

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Google is some sort of amazingly sophisticated company, filled with the most amazing people that ever worked in information technology. Maybe that’s true. I’ve met a few Googlers, and they’ve generally struck me as above average in intellect and sophistication.

But that doesn’t change the fact that is that Google is a company filled with people. Google’s search algorithms are written by people. “SearchSearch” was written by people. Google’s webspam identification and suppression tactics are written by people. People with their own quirks, blind spots, and judgements about what’s important and what’s a distraction.

It’s also important to remember that quirky, idiosyncratic decisions can have long lasting effects. In his efforts to find a reason not to ban James Joyce Ulysses, Justice Woolsey used the phrase “intent to arouse.” 80 years later, this “intent to arouse” is still market as the dividing ling between “legitimate artistic inquiry” and pandering; between expression that must be protected and work that must be suppressed.

This is not a theoretical concern. We’ve had our DVDs seized by customs officials in Germany. We’ve had our DVDs removed from store shelves in Australia. Here in the US we’ve had retailers decide they can’t carry our work for fear of prosecution. Film festivals that have tried to screen our films have been threatened with fines and their programers threatened with jail time. In one instance police actually raided a film festival where “Ashley and Kisha” was schedule to play to prevent the film from being screened.

These are the realities of the world in which we make our films; and when Google excises [clitoris] from their SafeSearch returns – whether out of prudery, expediency, ignorance or laziness – they reenforce these realities. When Google classes explicit sexuality as just another variety of internet malware, they reenforce these realities.

Google is a private company with no obligation free speech, and no obligation to strive for “fairness” or “equality” in their search returns; and they are certainly under no obligation to advocate for my vision of sexual equality and liberty.

But whether they like it or not, Google has become a powerful force for how our culture takes shape in this new searchable age. Where will Google’s influence be most keenly felt? Along the margins; at the edge of new ideas and minority opinions, arenas that require nuanced judgements, and a gentle hand.

So far, where sex is concerned, Google has failed. To date, Google’s approach to [clitoris] and other erotic words, and erotic website, has been, at best, thoughtless and clumsy.

Because of the shame and secrecy that surrounding sexuality, it’s an area of expression that attracts more than it’s share of asocial and antisocial entities. The task that Google faces separating bad actors from honest participants in the marketplace of ideas in undoubtably challenging.

But Googles current approach favors coded language and pranksterism over candor. It grants undue deference to already established voices, while disproportionately penalizing those who are already marginalized.

In Google quest to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” Google treats sexual information and expression as acceptable losses in it’s mission to achieve it’s goal. The zero “safe” returns result for [clitoris], [nude], [erotic], etc. is accepted as collateral damage in Google’s ongoing war on spam, and that war on spam has (inadvertently, I hope) become a war on sex.

Can Google do better? Maybe. Will they try? I hope so.

YankeePioneer @ Jezebel.com has some interesting Google gossip…

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Jezebel picked the Google [penis] v [clitoris] story this morning, and maybe, must maybe it’s going back to Google. Says commenter YankeePioneer:

I just sent this item to a friend who works at Google. Here is his response:

“Just for you, I have just sent an email to a bunch of very powerful people featuring the word ‘clitoris’. Baring concerns of internal propriety and confidentiality, will let you know what happens.”

Dragged into Google’s Sex Ghetto, Kicking and Screaming.

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

“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

“You don’t know shit from good chocolate, babies.”Joe Dick

As mentioned previously, I had been working on a post tentatively entitled “Does the Googlebot have Asperger’s Syndrome?” but I realize now that the analogy is too generous. People with Asperger’s see and understand the world differently from “normal” people, but I’ve never read anything about Asperger’s that suggests that Aspies are especially lazy or malfeasant.

The way that Google’s SafeSearch filter handles returns for [penis] vs. the way it handles them for [clitoris] isn’t a product of seeing things differently. It’s just plain lazy. Somewhere inside of Google, an engineer was tasked with filtering “adult” sites from returning under “strict filtering” searches. Somehow he (I’m going to have to assume this engineer is a man,) when confronted with the vagaries English language, was able to write an algorithm that allowed 30 million “safe” returns for [penis]. But when faced with the same problem for [clitoris] he found it easier to simply put clitoris on a list of banned words.

That’s not Aspie-ish, that’s just lazy and sexiest.

[Erotic] was too much trouble for him, so it got banned too. [Nude] and [naked] were too much trouble, so they were out. His algorithm couldn’t tell the difference between a nursery rhyme rooster and a raging hard-on, so [cock] got banned. Is this webpage talking about kitty-cats or cunts? His algorithm couldn’t tell, so [pussy] went on to the list, along with [bastard] and [anus]. For some reason his algorithm could find 4.7 million “safe” returns for [glans] and 2.5 million “safe” returns for [testicle], but not a single “safe” return for [fellatio] or [cunnilingus], so they went on the list as well.

That’s not the product of a odd blind spot to social interaction, that’s just lazy and ass-covering; not to mention laughable coming from a company that touts its “advance proprietary technology.”  (I’ll leave it to someone else to decide whether or not it’s [evil].)

A couple of days ago Seth Finklestein wrote a post linking to my “Taking the Real Sex out of [Real Sex] Searches” post. This morning Seth’s post is page two on the “do not filter my results’ search for [real sex], while my original post is somewhere around page 50. If I write about sex, the algorithm says it’s irrelevant, but if Seth writes about me writing about sex, it’s relevant. The algorithm isn’t just “advanced proprietary technology”, it’s post-modern too!

People ask, “Why are films that have explicit sex so badly made? Why is the lighting bad? Why are stories inane? Why the focus on misogynistic circus-sex, rendered in the most ham-fisted way? Why aren’t there films that treat audiences better? Why aren’t there films that treat sex better? Why does everything have to be so crude, tasteless, and poorly made?”

The answer is that these films are made in a ghetto, a ghetto walled in by the legal, business, and social constraints that are put on films, and on the people who make them. Anyone who makes films or video that deal with sexuality in an explicit way must do so mindful of with these constraints. Our own films are no different.

Our efforts have been finely calibrated against these constraints, and I’d like to think that we’ve had some success. Our films have played in venues not generally receptive to films that celebrate erotic pleasure. But more importantly, these films have touched people’s hearts, opened people’s eyes, and even changed people’s minds about what is possible in the collision of sex and the moving image.

But even as our films have received recognition from an ever more diverse range of sources – film festivals, universities, newspapers and magazines – revenues from our website have steadily fallen. What once was the mainstay of our operation is now a secondary revenue stream. Our diminished visibility on Google across a wide range of search strings has cut our traffic substantially, with a corresponding decrease in sales on our website.

Before this week I had seen this as a quirk, a fluke in Google’s algorithm, and as something that there might be some hope of addressing. I took Google at its word, that honesty would, in the end, win out. I saw it as a temporary set back, and thought that if I kept making my films as best I could, and writing about them honestly, that they would we would find our rightful place in the Googleverse. That maybe getting ranked at page 50 — back behind the spammers, and the archane agency documents, and the pedophilic trolling, back behind the posts linking to our posts — that maybe that was all just an accident.

The discoveries of the last week — the banned words like [clitoris] and [nude], the autofill for [stormfront] but not for [comstock films], [real sex] returns scrubbed clean of virtually all results with actual real sex — have forced me and Peggy to re-evaluate.

If this is the new reality, with a filtered “Googlenet” in place of the internet that incubated and made it possible for us to do what we do, then there’s little hope of re-capturing our lost website revenues, and that raises questions about what’s next.  Google’s actively suppression of sexual content changes the calculus. It devalues honesty and frankness in favor of coded language and pranksterism, and in so doing, it makes it hard for us to make a living making the films we make.

So we’re looking to re-cast ComstockFilms.com to make it “safe”. To that end we’re looking at Christianist anti-sex sites and “women’s” sites that use terms like “vajayjay“.

But in all candor, I find the prospect of this incredibly depressing.

15 years ago I found Blowfish.com and thought: Ah ha, this is it! This is what I’ve been looking for. A place where sex isn’t stupid, or cutesy, or hopelessly wrapped up in phony medical jargon or academic pretense. A place where it didn’t matter if you were a man or a women, gay or straight. Blowfish was a place that was talking about sex they way I was thinking about it.

15 years later I’m remembering what it was like to work outside of the sex ghetto. I’m remembering that when I made films about death and disaster, when I made my living off of other people’s dying, no one ever tried to silence me. No one ever said you can’t show that starving child, or that dying man, or that pile of corpses. I’m remembering that no one was ever made to feel ashamed for watching or enjoying my films.

No, they told me my films were honest; and that my honesty is what let me find the beauty and dignity in the midst of squalor and misery. They told me I was courageous to take so much sorrow into my heart and and give back love.

I’ve tried to bring that to the films I make about love and sex. But it doesn’t look like there’s any place for my sort honesty in the Googleverse – not even with all of their advanced proprietary technology. Like  [nude], or [clitoris], it’s just too hard. Easier just to sweep us off into a little corner of the Googleverse, a corner labeled “unsafe”.

Unsafe.

Penis = Safe; Clitoris = Not Safe. (Why can’t the Googlebot find a single SafeSearch return for [clitoris]?)

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Hello and welcome Susie Bright visitors. The post she meant to link to is here: Dragged Google’s Sex Ghetto

—-

Another entry for the Google’s Banned Words list: Clitoris.

That’s right. Put your Google SafeSearch filter on “strict filtering” and search [clitoris]. Zero returns.

Now try a Google SafeSearch “strict filtering” search for [penis]. 33,000,000 returns.

Googles says it’s SafeSearch filtering system uses an “advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories.” This wonderous technology, this algorithm is able to find 33 million “safe” returns for [penis], but not a single “safe” return for [clitoris].

Not a single return.

(Google’s “strict filtering” offers over 74,000 SafeSearch results for [vajayjay])