Google's Bizarre Blacklist

[katty]

Ever since Google unveiled its new search function, hackers have been compiling a list of banned words, including Latina and “meats.” Brian Ries talks to some of the blacklisted.

more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-04/googles-bizarre-blacklist/?cid=hp:mainpromo9

Somewhere hidden deep within Google’s massive cache of servers, there is a blacklist unlike any other. For starters, it contains enough sexually suggestive terms to make any 15-year-old boy’s head explode. But there are also some unexpected words, like, say, Latina. And hidden from public view, the official version will never see the light of day.

But over the past few weeks, a group of hackers in New York City has been trying to crack the code.


The list started with Google’s new search function, Google Instant. Introduced in early September, it shows results as you type—as opposed to waiting for you to press enter. It works like a telepathic Internet concierge, hoping to send you along to the most relevant results on the Web.

And since its debut, the hackers at The Hacker Quarterly have been reverse-engineering search terms and making a list of words that the company’s algorithms have blacklisted, in an attempt to sanitize its real-time results.

[Warpy]

1. I remember seeing trigger words that the NSA was using

when they were spying on Undernet and some of them were really bizarre, having nothing to do with the left, drugs, terror nets, Islam, or anything else the paranoiacs in this country freak out about. I'm not surprised that Google's filtering code contains some perfectly normal words.

I'm grateful that the first 100 results of any search aren't porn sites, though.

[sharp_stick]

2. Not really a blacklist IMO

if you hit the search button they all show up. Google has them blocked from the instant view because they are commonly searched for in association with adult and or "family inappropriate" terms.

If they actually blocked the content it could be called a blacklist but there is no real block in this.

[awoke_in_2003]

3. ah shit...

"Latina" is one of my favorite searches :)