LOS ANGELES—Salon.com's Jenny Kutner argued today that Google has devised, and is currently operating, a "genius plan to eradicate porn in search results" by using user complaints about "seemingly 'clean' search terms" that also return sexually explicit results as the justification for censoring the sex for any subsequent searches using the same words or terms. The plan, such as it is, allegedly targets image and video searches only.
Kutner was reacting to an article posted yesterday by Vice/Motherboard senior editor Brian Merchant about his recent experience with what he assumed would be an innocuous search using the term "Big Ol'."
"In particular," he wrote, "I was curious as to whether 'big ol' or 'big ole' would be the more appropriate way to go. Naturally, I googled 'big ol' to discern a point of reference. That point of reference turned out to be some graphic woman-on-dog bestiality porn."
More specifically, image results included "A Toby Keith album cover, a screenshot of a video of a woman fornicating with a large canine, a women with breasts that have been photoshopped into enormity, an Adventuretime still, two photos of women's butts, a giant dead bear, more butts, more bear, a nude woman, a bottomless woman rolling in snacks, and that same woman from earlier allowing the canine to perform cunnilingus on her. It goes on.
"Again," he adds, "Google searches that cough up potentially offensive images are nothing new. But the unusual combination of the banal search and the aggressively repulsive results—I counted four stills from the bestiality photo shoot in the first few rows of returns—were enough to lead me to reach out to Google.
Thus his somewhat disingenuous headline—"Do Not Google 'Big Ol' Unless You Want to See Bestiality Porn"—is misleading because the piece itself describes Merchant's efforts to get an explanation from Google about the disparate search results, which he finally receives from a Google rep who informs him, "We've updated things so within a few days the inappropriate results shouldn't show up anymore."
In other words, the headline should read, "Don't Worry About Googling 'Big Ol' Anymore, Because We Got Google to Remove the Beastiality Porn."
It is precisely that mechanism that likely prompted Kutner to see a "genius plan" in play by Google, which she likely assumes can now avoid criticisms of outright censorship of legal content (any actual contraband, i.e. images of child abuse, etc. should of course always be flagged, removed and investigated) by laying the blame on users filing complaints.
However, her "genius" claim could also be ironic, because she states in the piece, "When it comes to seeking out porn in order to eradicate it, however, there’s room for skepticism about the efficacy of the project and about who will determine what constitutes 'offensive' material in the first place."
Unfortunately, she then adds, "There’s plenty of it out there, but it’s often mistaken for being perfectly acceptable."
Material could also be mistaken for being perfectly unacceptable, of course, which is precisely the point when discussing subjective notions of what is offensive.
It should also be noted that Google's SafeSearch filter would likely have filtered the beastiality images from Merchant's results, had he activated it, which he clearly did not. We know that because one of the other images he thought curious—the "women with breasts that have been photoshopped into enormity"—is still there in a search for "Big Ol'" with SafeSearch off, but goes away with a search for the same term with SafeSearch on. That means that SafeSearch, while imperfect, works pretty much as advertised, scrubbing results clean of most images and videos offering "pornographic" content.
Oddly, what Vice and Salon may unwittingly be advocating for is a Google that actually scrubs "porn" results for all people, and not just for those who surf without a seatbelt fastened (i.e. SafeSearch off.) At the very least they seem to be arguing for that with respect to words and terms they think have nothing to do with sexual activity, apperently forgetting that the intersection where language and sex regularly (and appropriately) meets is unknowable and ever-changing.
Scraping away those associations would also appear to be anathema to Google's mission, in spite of Kutner's somewhat frivolous claim that they want to "eradicate porn in search results." Eradicate is a violent term that denotes a permanent termination of something, and one would think that Salon (of all places!) would greet with alarm rather than naive insouciance the idea that the world's most popular search engine might actually disappear word and image associations that some people find inappropriate, instead of letting the filter do its work.
It is therefore worth noting that the Google rep who replied to Merchant's queries also directed him to an official Google statement sent in 2012 to The Verge, in response to allegations "that the company was censoring pornographic images in search after it updated its image search to work more like regular search."
Google commented at the time, "We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for—but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting—you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in web search."
That statement is a few years old, however, and Google has in the interim significantly changed (evolved?) the algorithms it uses to render adult-related results, and also of course its stance toward porn on AdWords. Publicly, these moves are seen as hostile to adult content, earning the praise of anti-porn groups like Morality in Media, which actually took credit for the AdWords change in policy, but recent developments indicate that AdWords is willing to be reasonable and continue to work with some adult sites, and the fact remains that no one, not even those outsiders who have been invited to "work" on policy with Google, have a clue about its intentions or what it is actually going to do.
Everyone, however, is looking intently at Google as if into a crystal ball, hoping to divine what its plans are for adult content. Even the mainstream seems to have a perverse obsession with the future of porn on Google, as if it alone will determine porn's destiny. As ludicrous as that may be, it's a fascinating dynamic that says as much about the people opining as it does about Google, and in a real way casts porn in the role of the canary in the coal mine, though perhaps more people should be concerned about the likelihood that the uncertainty (and alleged eradication) that porn is facing today could be visited upon them tomorrow.
