Today I stumbled upon a very interesting article at Hackernoon.com titled The Best Private Search Engines — Alternatives to Google. They had done some research on search engines who don't (or if You're paranoid, claims to not) collect private information of their users, and in most cases don't even save your search or the result of it when You leave the site. Some of these search engines was allready known to me. One of them is my main daily choise and I have used another one of them now and then, but most of them where new to me so I decided to try them out and do some testing myself.
At first I searched for some random stuff, but then I decided to search swisscows for "penis fish". Partly because I wanted to see if there were any updated news on the infestation at Drakes Beach and partly to see if this blog would turn up in the results since I wrote about it two days ago.
Well, it turned out i wasn't allowed to search for "penis fish" but got a message saying:
"Dear user,
the entered word is not allowed for under 18 year olds, since we have decided on the protection of minors, the word "penis fish" is excluded from the search.
Thank you very much for your understanding!"
The protection of minors is fine. I'm all for it. Only I don't quite see how banning the clinical name of a bodypart shared by all male mammals is going to protect minors. I can't se how this protects anyone from anything except from the word "penis" itself. Do minors need protection from certain words? Are languages in themselves evil and/or pose a threat to minors?
Also, I wasn't really interested in penises and it wasn't what I searched for, even if I can understand if there is some confusion since the likeness to the bodypart is what gave the species in question it's nick name.
OK, since I wasn't allowed to search for "penis fish" I changed the input to "fat innkeeper worm" which is another name for exactly the same thing, and guess what. Swisscows returned hundreds and hundreds of links to pages with "penis fish" both in titles, urls and description!
I wasn't allowed to use a word once but swisscows were OK with having it splattered all over their page. If that isn't hypocracy, I don't know what is.
What do You think? Does the word "penis" (or "penis fish") pose a threat to minors? Should all the newsagencies and scientific sites reporting and writing about the "penis fish" remove the name or change it to "fat innkeeper worm"? Or should search engines in general and swisscows in particular at least adapt their censorship of output to match their censorship of input?
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