Google unsure: is Paris Hilton naughty?
TIME is money, so they say, which may be one reason a famous web search engine has devised Google Instant to shave milliseconds off your searches. Start to type in a search word, and Google’s computers will guess what the word is before you finish and flag up its guesses in a drop-down box along with search results based on the letters you have typed so far.
So far, so good. But what happens if a small child types in a few letters that happen to be the start of the kind of search that people hide from their bosses? Don’t worry. Google won’t fill in the rest if it thinks the word is a naughty one, and it won’t list any links. If you want to search for something naughty yourself, you have to type in the whole word and then hit Enter.
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The trouble is, once filters of naughty words get started, they don’t know when to stop. Volunteers have been compiling a list of Google’s blacklisted words at , which at the time of writing stood at 447 entries. It makes perplexing reading.
For example, Google appears to be in two minds about “Paris Hilton”, banning her from the drop-down box but not from the search results. On the other hand, “hooker” is excluded from both, meaning it takes an effort to find the American civil war general Joseph Hooker – but Google seems happy with “whore” or “prostitute”.
Meanwhile, anything that ends in “dick” is blocked, including “Tricky Dick”, for late US president Richard Nixon, and Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer.
Other phrases on the list seem entirely innocuous to us. What’s wrong with “rapping women” for instance? But perhaps Google’s naughtiness experts know more about such matters than we do.
WE WONDERED, in our story about “Terry”, who spams people offering to give them two Yorkshire terrier puppies (25 September), how Terry’s scam works. Colin “no relation to Terry” Watters sends us an email with a photo of a cute puppy attached.
“To illustrate how this scam works I arranged to ship the enclosed puppy to you by airfreight yesterday. This is the actual puppy I sent so you can show it to your children and they can decide on a new name for her.
“Today I can confirm she has safely arrived at Ecalp Dab Airport en route to you but there is the small matter of her quarantine bill. It’s only $25 so please arrange for a transfer of $25 to account number 419419 at the bank of Sremmacs. Do not delay because if your payment arrives too late they will have her put down.
“Sadly the quarantine facilities in Ecalp Dab are not very good. The other puppy I shipped caught a cold and had to spend six months there undergoing expensive medical treatment. Sadly in the end she died despite the owner spending a lot of money.”
Poor little puppy! Send off that $25 straight away.
WHILE on holiday deep in the English countryside, Richard and Kath Prior were driving to their farmhouse bed-and-breakfast one night, guided by the satnav in their car. When they turned down the track leading to the farm, the satnav said “Navigate off-road”, which was fair enough. The next instruction was rather more unexpected: “Drive 248,326 million miles to highlighted route.”
Richard can think of three possible explanations. First, that this was a message from extraterrestrials who were hoping he and Kath might go and meet them. Second, it might have been a message from Kath’s dead ancestors, who the couple were researching and some of whom were buried locally. Her ancestors, Richard says, were God-fearing folk, and may have sent the co-ordinates for heaven.
But Richard’s preferred explanation is the third one. “I confess to taking a perverse pleasure in trying to wind up the girl in the satnav, by ignoring her instructions when driving through familiar territory”, he admits. “So far she has remained stoically patient in her attempts to get me back on course. Was she at last getting her own back?”
FINALLY, the makers of Dettol antiseptic products have started promoting a “no-touch hand washing system”. This is a soap pump that automatically senses your hands and dispenses soap, so you don’t have to touch it.
Dettol’s web page at warns that “your soap pump can harbour hundreds of bacteria”. Clearly a scary state of affairs to which the no-touch system could be the answer. “Never touch a germy soap pump again,” the advert advises.
However, Peter Hoare feels he must be missing something. “I usually touch the soap pump before I wash my hands, not after, so it really doesn’t matter if the pump is germy because… oh never mind.”
“Sewage treatment works”, announced the sign seen by David Tweedie on the road out of Warwick, in the English midlands. That’s a relief, then”
