Google's autocomplete blacklist

Google's autocompleting Google Instant has a long blacklist of forbidden words that don't get autocompleted, including "Linda Lovelace," "4chan," "ass" "dirty pillows" "are [jews|christians|catholics, etc]", "sexy" and many others. More interesting is the non-blacklisted words (including "goat.se," "outercourse" and "blood play") though whether this is the result of a failure of prurience in the engineering team tasked with coming up with the list, or some value judgment, is impossible to know. I suppose that dirty Google autocompletes are the 21st century equivalent of looking up dirty words in the class dictionary (my school had a dictionary that defined "lesbian" as "one addicted to the unnatural vice of Sappho"). (via Super Punch)

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Antinous / Moderator

my school had a dictionary that defined “lesbian” as “one addicted to the unnatural vice of Sappho”

My high school had an English teacher that handed me Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation for a 9th grade reading assignment. In a small town in New England. In 1972. Essays included Happy Birthday, Baby Butch, Sissy in Prison and Rapping with a Revolutionary Street Transvestite.

There are reasons why we Boomers are sometimes nostalgic about the old days. If a teacher did that today, she’d be executed, her house razed and the ground where she walked salted.
Anonymous

I’ve written to 2600 several times, but the most obvious exclusion is the word “adult”… you can’t get past the “U”
redstarr

I like that it does that when I’m at work. It doesn’t censor the real results,just the instant stuff. If I did want to see something that was blacklisted, I could just finish typing it in and hit enter and the results would be there like always. But the blacklist makes it so that those words or pages or images can’t possibly show up if I’m searching in view of a customer.

And really how instant do you need the results to be? Especially if you’re looking for some of that black listed stuff? If I’m looking for something kind of mature, I can wait a second or two to type the whole name. And while a few of those words have some very tame possibilities you could actually be searching for, most of the searchers for a lot of those are almost certainly not looking for the tame stuff. If you’re googling “black cock”, yeah, you totally could be looking for a male dark colored chicken, but chances are much better that those suggestions aren’t going to be what you really want. At least they’re being realistic. They’re not pretending that everyone that googles “ass” is looking for articles on donkeys.
Volker

I wonder what the dictionary entry for “Sappho” was. Or for her greek home island :-)
Cory Doctorow

“Sappho: An ancient Greek poetess.”

Basically, according to this dictionary, lesbians are addicted to writing poetry.
- dragonfrog
  
  Wait, lesbians aren’t addicted to writing poetry?
- lasttide
  
  Based on college poetry open mics, this is not necessarily inaccurate.
- RevelryByNight
  
  I sure as hell was, at least when I was old enough to need the dictionary to confirm my suspicions.
  
  Also, “lesbian” is a blacklisted word, while “gay” is not. I’m going to try and not let that piss me off.
Anonymous

4chan works for me!
I type in “4″ and the FIRST string after it from Google is “chan”
Anonymous

My favorite to enter is “Santorum”
Halloween Jack

“dirty pillows”? Good grief. I wonder if Stephen King knows about this.
Rosetta

I tried to search for a local cafe called “Massa” and the suggested completion was “massage sex”.
Matt J

“are [jews|christians|catholics, etc]” works just fine for me.
Matt J

Just checked the list, “are [jews|christians|catholics, etc]” isn’t blacklisted but “[jews|christians|catholics, etc] are” is.
Micah

Also, goat.se isn’t blacklisted, but goatse is.
DataShade

The Cheezburger network of lolcat-type sites has a branch called “Autocomplete Me” that just focuses on the terrible things that come up from partial search entries.
TooGoodToCheck

It’s incredibly easy to come up with a really long list of dirty words, but it is amazingly difficult to come up with a comprehensive list of dirty words.
Xenu

“Google is e”

Funny how that’s censored…