Would Google and Yahoo Geo-Filter Adult Searches?
 

I am in the process of adding a PICS label through Safesearch rating my sites as Adult, and ICRA labels doing the same to all my sites.
There has been a general agreement as to the adult webmasters duty to add some sort of labeling to their sites, and quite a discussion as to which method to use...one of the above for example, a simple meta tag, or even a completely new method.

Search engines have become a primary method of finding porn on-line.
You would probably be surprised at how many of my clients do not even use the address bar in their browsers anymore, but type all their URLs directly into browser search bars.

We have all seen in the news how Google, MSN, Yahoo and other search engines have been tailoring their results by geo targetting....a prime example is China.

Why don't we really push as an industry to have all the major search engines geo target their search results for porn related terms so that unless a web site has an adult tag, it will not show up in any search results from a United States based ip address? As far as what type of adult tag, the search engines themselves can tell us which to use.
Any other country that also wants such filtering of adult sites, could simply tell the search engines to do so. The major search engines have already complied with several such requests such as the above mentioned China...and Nazi related terms in Germany, etc.

As far as international webmasters, they would be free to do as they wanted, but if they wanted to show up in search results in the United States (and any other country that wanted this system), they would have to comply.

Sure this is not a complete answer by any means, but it would be a great first foot forward.

Google already does some filtering for certain words that could be porn or not on their english results, giving different results if you go to a foriegn language site instead of coming to the regular .com site.

Alex

Right, and they could extend it fully. They do in other countries so why not the US?
Mad Max mentioned this in the labelling thread, and I cannot see why this wouldn't work.

It is the reverse. If you search for SEX on google.com and on google.es (example) you will get different results.

They are already limiting sites with the word sex that are potentially porn sites from appearing in those listing as displayed to english language surfers.

Search engines can do almost anything, but it really doesn't do a think to clear up the issues of porn. Remember, google says porn searches are less than 10% of their total searches!

Alex

Think you are misunderstanding what I am saying.
Take Google for example. In Germany it doesn't matter what datacenter you use...if you do a search for neonazi you will get a filtered result for Germany totally outlaws references to nazism.
If you do a search for Nepal Hindus in China you will get filtered results no matter the datacenter... Sure surfing around via a proxy will by pass a lot of the geo filtering, but the best effort is there.

Now you take a surfer typing milf, bukakee, oral sex, blowjob, cum, fuck, etc in the US. If a website does not have a certain tag on their site they will not even show in the search results if the search is made from a pc in the US. The tags are there...the search engines have the ability in place. Why not use it. The search engines are already being hounded by the US govt about their search histories on the excuse of CP. We are being hounded by the US govt under the guise of CP, and children being able to search and find porn.

Most adults are too lazy or plain ignorant to filter what their children surf. At least the major Search Engines and us webmasters could then show we were doing our best efforts to keep kids away from adult materials.

No matter what the current US govt believes the US cannot dictate what a webmaster in Belarus, turkey, brazil, or for that matter Canada does.

But they can pass laws in the US affecting what an American webmaster can do. If we are not making an effort that SHOWS, (such as volentary filtering and labelling), they will find a way to make it mandatory under their terms.

I see it as a win/win situation for both the US webmaster and the major SE's if we take the first step.

Meatponder, I do understand - but the problem is the flexibility of the english language. Think of words like cock, wood, bush, greek, russian, balls, melons... the filtering by word would be almost impossible because the language evolves. How could they know that someone searching for Bush Melons would be looking for sex or for recipes from the president for deserts?

You can filter a very few terms that are clearly porn (porn, porno, fuck, tits, anal sex, etc) but is pussy about cats or human anatomy?

Alex

HOW MUCH DO PEOPLE USE GOOGLE TO LOOK FOR PORN?

LARRY PAGE: It's a small, single-digit percentage. We generally think that having more access is better, as long as you're not a child or overly offended. But we can help people do filtering if that's what they want, though there is no technology that can tell with 100% accuracy if an image or website is pornographic.

Time's Interview dated Feb 12, 2006.

First that is what they say, but I've read other reports. Plus even if that is accurate a small, single digit percentage could mean 9%

From this story http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2006...pcworld/124688

So with those numbers and assuming the 9% that is almost 500 million searches for porn in the US alone.

Plus you could twist statistics showing most chilren looking for porn do so by search engine.

Sure filtering would be hard, and there is no way for every search term to be filtered. But it is the effort that matters.

We take the stand that though we believe the primary reponsibility of what children surf lies with the parents first and foremost, we in the industry are volantarily doing all in our power to help the parents.

The ability to filter is there, the ability to label is there, so what if it is an imperfect solution. At least we would be doing something rather then arguing about what was best and doing nothing waiting for the Federal Goverment to decide what we have to do.

Not sure why you say "....search results from a United States based ip address", why not everywhere or nowhere?

I'm not sure that we should be pushing the SEs to do anything. I know many countries have their own filtering systems at the Internet gateways and it doesn't matter what Google does or does not do. Singapore, Malaysia, The UAE and many others do their own filtering.

I also don't want to be focusing on who or how filtering should take place. It's a big can of worms to try an influence some of the world's largest corporations.

I think our time is better spent focusing on labeling sites so that many technologies can filter and allow the consumers to push for their preferred methods.

I doubt you would get any search engine to filter results for adult sites in the US. This is just a guess but wouldn't that be considered censorship?

There are several who don't list any adult sites already.

Maj Stress, sorry, but censorship isn't an issue for a private company such as google. They can list or not list anything they want, there is no "right to a google listing".

Alex

Alex,
I am aware that google, yahoo and the rest can do as they please within the limits of the law. They do give warnings in some cases that you are entering an area that will have adult content. I do NOT see it in their business interest to filter out search results, and totally omit them in a country where it is perfectly legal to display the results.

In China it is illegal therefore the results are filtered out. In a market like the US, it is legal and a search engine can profit from it. It would be very hard to convince them to do otherwise when profit motivation is involved.

It would be very much in their interest. Blockbuster became the worlds biggest video rental company by "filtering out" adult videos, and one of the two reasons AOL became the worlds biggest ISP was its "child safe" adult site filtering option. If Google banned adult searches it would leave Yahoo and Microsoft Search behind.

I think that is where Alta Vista came up with the saying "No Tits, No Hits" ;)

Never heard that before, but it kind of proves my point. Alta Vista are a long way behind the others.

First off - the Altavista doesnt matter anymore as they got bought by Yahoo and are using Yahoos index

As far as censoring results - Google already does do it as Alex mentioned above with terms like "sex" for English speaking searchers where they have censored the results for the last 2 years - they didnt used to and it was an amazing source of traffic (although pretty shitty)

A good comparison instead of using the hl=en term in the search results URL for google would be to look at the results in russian (hl=ru) - those are partially geo-filtered and uncensored for the term "sex"


Google has always also filtered results for some other things - especially when it came to their AdWords advertising with things like cigarettes (they dont allow ad campaigns for smoke resellers) and guns, casinos etc.
As far as search engines saying that they censor publicly - probably not going to happen in the US - not Google anyway and especially not for something like adult terms. The word sex is just one that they started censoring when Google first came about and they turned off the censoring for a few years then reinstituted it at the request of their owners.