In the days before Safesearch, every google search was kind of a gamble.
But these days, we still have a little surprise here and there to deal with. Sometimes your search for "tornadoes" shows up breasts. Nobody is really sure why, but, it does.
And those times are always the worst times to do it--when someone is standing over your shoulder, usually.
u/Saraieth asked:
What is an innocent sounding Google search that returns not so innocent results?
Here were some of those answers.
That's No Wand
Halloween is coming, needed an accessory for little girls 'good witch' costume. Did an image search for a magic wand. Seems most of them have to be plugged in.
Not A Poster
Back in high school I googled "motivational poster." This was in the school library, so safe search was preset to strict and everything.
3rd image was straight up porn. I think google's gotten smarter about it now, but 10 years ago that kind of ish would slip through all the time.
A New Kind Of Coding
If you're in the mindset of trying to format mathematical expressions in an image using open source software, latex gimp.
And std list when you're trying to find documentation on the C++ standard library list data structure
And I OOP
Black holes. In 9th grade we learned about space in science class and we each had to do a presentation on certain space related topics. Our teacher specifically told the student that was researching black holes to be careful what he clicked on when he went online.
Walked Right Into This
One time in my science class a long time ago, we were studying minerals and the teacher said to google cleavage. it did not return mineral cleavage.
Woody The Woodpecker
Oh man. Once I went looking for these awesome toys I had as a kid on Google. Big mistake.
When we were good in class, we could earn a reward of a toy from this little bag of cheap plastic toys my teacher had. Well, at some point she found these really cool little plastic woodpeckers that could slip over the end of your pencil and as you wrote, they would bounce on a tiny spring, as if they were pecking the wood of the pencil. Really neat.
So I remembered one day and I went to Google to see if I could find them and searched under their name, "pencil peckers."
Big mistake.
Double Meanings
My mom once stated that cheetahs and cougars were the same animal.
I searched pictures of cheetahs with no problem.
We had to have a talk after searching for cougars.
The Wrong Denotation
At one point in my life, my favorite song was Evil Angel by Breaking Benjamin. I had it stuck in my head, and couldn't remember how it went. So I googled it.
The kind of songs I used to listen to, being the emo little jerk that I was, were usually really ridiculous titles that you didn't have to put in the name of the artist with, or even specify that you wanted lyrics, and that's what I got used to. Just searching the song title.
It has since been changed, but do you know what the first thing that came up was when I searched 'Evil Angel'?
A link to a hardcore porn website called Evil Angel.
The Last Thing You Want To See
I specialise in animal behavioural ecology and I focus on large carnivores. When I began specialising in this subject (so this began with doing my Masters research years ago) I would look up images of the species I was studying for powerpoint presentations. I would often put the word art in when it came to extinct species. With that being said, I was absolutely unaware on how prevalent furry art is.
What Kind Of Stoves?
One of the loan officers at the bank I work for was just telling me this story, actually. He was chatting with a customer about Longfellow stoves, and they were wondering if they were still in business. He pulls up the first site he sees, and manages to trigger every alarm system set up on the computer system.
@PreetBharara/X
@RepBrendanBoyle/X
@twesq/Bluesky
@christopherharris/Bluesky
@evangelinewarren/X
@FrankC164/X
AMC