Bill's Comment Page

"Objectionable Content"

This is the classification attributed to my little blog in a recent search engine result which alighted here - I noticed it when browsing visitors recorded by my hit counter. The search engine used was not one of the better known ones, at least to me, but some outfit called "Zworks (which they helpfully advise is pronounced 'Zee works')".

I was curious to understand what could have been 'objectionable' to this outfit, and whomever wrote their filtering software. A clue might be that one of the options available in this 'meta' search engine is called 'Bible Search' and they explain some of their modus operandii thus:

"Features of the Zworks Filtered Meta Search Engine - Our Filter

"…. information is passed through a filter which removes sites with obvious vulgarities (common "four letter" words) and then subjects the title and description of the remaining results to a filtration by word combinations and sequences which are common to adult and hate sites.

"…. since we are filtering the site name, description and URL and not the actual site, this is not a totally "Child-Safe" filtration process. These procedures cannot remove all sites of questionable content but definitely "clean up" the screen containing your search results by eliminating most surprises when searching for content which you thought unrelated to these areas. You don't have to worry about your children being close while performing a search because of the language they might see."

Now the actual topic of the search recorded in my browser was "2003/04 guestbook for market woman in far arab" which may perhaps be incomplete, but is a bizarre concatenation of words, it seems to me. 'Zee works' is located in Houston, Texas, from what they say in their website and obviously is concerned with filtering what can be seen by young minds - fair enough, it's a free world (more or less) and these people seem to have a "Christian" (which I use, in this context, quite loosely) point of view.

So what is 'objectionable' about my little blog? I've no definite idea, but I strongly suspect that the fact that I am gay, and have the temerity to put this in the introduction at the top of the page, must be the root of the classification. In any case the psychology behind this kind of classification is clearly flawed - if you don't want someone to follow a search engine result it would seem better to put some anodyne title at the top, if it wasn't excluded from the search entirely (and as I exclude all 'profanity' from my site for my own reasons), which would reduce significantly the likelihood of someone hitting that link, rather than something almost designed to trigger curiosity such as "Objectionable Content". Just a thought ....