

Google Blacklist – Words That Google Instant Doesn't Like (2010) - christianbryant
http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/

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UnoriginalGuy
This doesn't really bug me since, frankly, autocomplete is just a convenient
extra.

But just to use this as a soapbox two things that DO bug me:

\- Android's keyboards REFUSES to type "rude" (by American standards) words in
a super buggy way. There is a setting called "Block offensive words" that as
far as I can tell does absolutely nothing (they're blocked regardless). You
first need to uncheck that, THEN add them one by one to your custom
dictionary, and only then it might SOMETIMES type "fuck" instead of "duck."
But be careful to add "Fuck" and "fuck" to your dictionary as these are
different bad words (based on capitalisation, as is "FUCK").

\- Autocomplete is accepts suggestions without prompting, thus giving you
things you never asked for. This presents in two ways, in Chrome you are just
given it in the line and have to backspace before enter to clear, and in IE if
the mouse happens to be positioned over an autocomplete option even before
that option appeared, when you hit enter it will select that (helpful!).

~~~
taralx
The inability to swipe offensive words when the setting is disabled is a bug.
I can't give details, but the fix isn't easy and is being worked on.

~~~
m0nty
It won't accept "cock" or "suck", not together as in "cocksucker" but in
isolation. It goes with "stuck" or "such" when I try to swipe "suck", and
"chock" or "chick" instead of "cock". Thing is, these are not offensive words
- they're just part of the English language. Other things get sucked apart
from cocks. Quite a bug.

~~~
fieldsofgold
weird I have no problem with cocksucker. All I did was type it once, select it
from the the available words/auto-complete section, then went back and tried
to swipe cocksucker and had no issue.

~~~
m0nty
There seems to be a difference between typing and swiping. If I peck it out
one character at a time, no problem.

~~~
fieldsofgold
Interesting I have no issue swiping it. If i peck it in once then add it in
the dictionary I can then swipe it.

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DanBC
Last time I mentioned this I probably got ad-words and ad-sense mixed up, but
a bunch of people offered to help and send bug reports to the right place.

Here's an image of me trying to send feedback to adwords and it rejecting my
real name: [http://imgur.com/HdwxGd7](http://imgur.com/HdwxGd7)

I usually think it's funny when this happens, unless it's a hospital delaying
blood test results.

(The feedback was sorted a few days later so they didn't need my report.)

~~~
surreal
In case you haven't found a way around those ridiculous validations, try
adding arbitrary dots ( . ) in the middle of the "offensive" part. Gmail will
deliver any dotted version of your own username into your own inbox as normal.

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karmacondon
A friend and I share the same first and last name, and for a long time the
first instant suggestion for our name was "[name] sex offender" (because of
another person with the same first and last).

My friend lobbied with google for a long time, and surprisingly they ended up
disabling all suggestions for our name. I'm not sure if we were added to the
Blacklist or if google has some other mechanism for this situation, but I was
pleasantly surprised. It's good to see that google will implement this for
non-famous people as well.

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lotharbot
This keeps grandma from accidentally stumbling onto something offensive by
mistyping one character.

For example, they stop autocompleting on the word cuckoLd at the letter "L".
That happens to be the point at which it diverges from the word cuckoo. I know
I wouldn't want to be searching for a cuckoo clock, mistype one letter, and
suddenly have a bunch of stuff about adultery on my screen (or worse, a bunch
of x-rated images).

This was probably obsoleted by Safe Search.

~~~
revelation
Google Instant is much more recent than Safe Search.

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iLoch
All I got from this is Bill is really into butt stuff. It's not as though
Google is actually preventing these topics from being discovered or censoring
their existence, but rather Google doesn't want to be an enabler for anyone
searching potentially controversial topics. I get it. I think though that they
may be overreaching with some terms, though I'm sure it's all automated so
those results are censored based on the content people are typically looking
for when conducting those searches.

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nailer
There's a similar list (or was in 2010/11) for Google developed web apps. It's
all the obvious things, plus a lot of seemingly non-offensive things which
4chan invented - eg, mudkips, leeroy jenkins, pool is closed, etc.

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christianbryant
It's been a while since I looked at this article. What are your updates to
this classic list? And, what terms have you searched for lately that raised
suspect results; not blacklisted terms, but terms that you would have expected
a whole other set of results for? While many of these are fairly banal and
humorous, there are expectations of Google search users when doing serious
research on human rights issues or political and big business wrong-doing that
they are resulted current and relevant data. Share your anecdotes...

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A_COMPUTER
If you started typing certain celebrities' names, Instant would inform you
that a bunch of people were curious if that celebrity was gay. I haven't seen
it do that in a while now, though. I have seen other weirdly suppressed things
as well, it kind of concerns me that somebody somewhere is exercising
invisible but principled editorial control over these things.

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amelius
I wonder if this list can be produced programmatically. I.e., a script that
enters words in the search bar, looks at the result when pressing enter, and
compares with the instant-search result. Then it could look for phrases of
more words, etc.

Note: you'd probably need either a lot of time or a botnet to run this script
without getting blacklisted :)

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sharkweek
The "anal" blacklisting has saved me from many embarrassing moments at work -
as I shorthand it all the time to get to Google Analytics

~~~
JamesSwift
I just hope they don't sniff my searches, as I google 'anal' and 'face' most
every day.

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Mobiu5
ball sack, ball kicking, ball gravy. These are the first ones I tried because
I thought they looked suspect. Google does return suggestions for these, so
not blacklisted. There must be several more false positives in this list if
the first ones I tried were wrong.

edit: Oh, this was last updated in 2010... nevermind then.

~~~
christianbryant
I noted earlier that this is an older article and I'm curious to hear what the
experience today is. Again, a lot of this is lowbrow, but I do hear from time
to time anecdotes of what seem to be serious rejections of certain search term
combinations, whether it be related to Google product exploit searches, or key
stories on hacktivist activities targeted at Google or Google partners. I have
yet to experience this myself, and seeing this old article got me curious what
is being experience in the here-and-now.

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cyphunk
the claims are very misleading and unclear. almost everything returns nothing
in google instant. try "horse", "house", "mitch". All return no instant
results for me. Perhaps I am missing something but this article appears to be
blowing things out of proportion.

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TorKlingberg
Similarly MS Word's spell checker will accept many common swear words, but
will not suggest them.

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Kiro
Is this referring to autosuggest or where the search results are shown below
as you type?

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ganzuul
Mmmh... Not getting a whole lot of hits on the blacklist. Even when searching
for analog stuff.

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jasonkostempski
I Really wish they would add "C String" to that list.

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Oblouk
A ton of these worked for me.

