Searching, always searching

I learned some new things today and thought I'd pass them along.

You can use the term "safesearch:" in Google to exclude adult content. For example, safesearch: sex education won't return sites with adult contents.

The word "date:" lets you search with a range of months (3, 6, or 12 months). For example, Olympics date: 3 searches for Olympics references within the past 3 months.

Do you believe this? I didn't. I had to see for myself.


So I googled "safesearch: sex education" (the phrase used as an example by Google). Most of the sites were about safesearch, some even listed the sites that you didn't get because you used safesearch.

The fourth site on the list had pictures of a nude female torso, a young man watching a woman disrobe, and a woman suggestively eating a banana. Not quite X rated, but not PG-13 either, by my reckoning.

I tried safesearch: spankings. This should have returned numerous sites about the use and misuse of physical violence as part of parental discipline, but actually returned more "naughty" adult sites than just searching for spankings alone.

Olympic date: 3 didn't work any better than safesearch. It gave me any web site with a 3 in a date, or that contained a 3 and the word "date".

As a control, I ran the sample experiment using the Advanced Search feature Return web pages updated in the past 3 months. It appeared to work well, at least on the first page.

The safesearch option under Advanced Search worked much better than putting safesearch in the google search box, but it wasn't foolproof. I didn't see any sites with dirty pictures in the first two pages when I googled sex education.


So what did we really learn here? Well, you may not have learned much, but the experiments were kind of educational for me.