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MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?
Posted by
simoniker
on Wed Mar 03, 2004 06:15 PM
from the because-they-made-a-mistake? dept.
from the because-they-made-a-mistake? dept.
Peacefire writes "Thomas Shaddack spotted this on http://www.root.cz/ (in Czech) -- if you go to http://search.msn.com/ and
search for 'XFree86', it tells you that you've 'entered a search term that is likely to return adult content', and directs you to the porn search engine NightSurf.com, which lists a bunch of porn sites that ostensibly match the term 'XFree86'. If you search for 'XFree86' on Google, however, it's clear that the top matching terms returned by a normal search, are XFree86 sites, are not a bunch of porn sites. MSN is apparently blocking the specific term 'XFree86' and not just filtering on something stupid like the 'X' or the 'Free', since you can search for 'XFree85' and 'XFree87' with no problem. And search terms like 'Linux', 'AOL' and 'Macintosh' are allowed, so at least MSN hasn't simply blacklisted all competitors' keywords as 'porn', but why would they be blocking 'XFree86'?"
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MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?
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Mirror List (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.dixie-chicks.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 24, @05:17PM)
Web Mirrors
Our web site is very busy and often causes timed out connections. The following sites have been verified as being both accurate and reliable in their mirroring process, and so we recommend these for the best access:
Costa Rica [ulatina.ac.cr]
Copenhagen, Denmark [opensource.cph.dk]
Paris, France [ovh.net]
St. Denis, France [univ-paris8.fr]
Berlin, Germany [berlios.de]
Dortmund, Germany [desiato.de]
Athens, Greece [xfree86.ntua.gr]
Seoul, Korea [mirror.or.kr]
Amsterdam, Netherlands [kookel.org]
Bucharest, Romania [unibuc.ro]
London, United Kingdom [earth.li]
Not posting as AC 'cause the troll potential would be too high...
Re:Mirror List (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mirror List (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://leamington.homedns.org/)
Because they're aware of its existence, but don't know anything about it. Just because you've heard of an open source project doesn't mean you are a Linux nut. People who are SEARCHING for XFree86 rather than just going to XFree86.org are more likely to be searching on MSN than a "better" search engine due to the fact that they're not savvy.
Re:Mirror List (Score:4, Funny)
(http://leamington.homedns.org/)
Re:Mirror List (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mirror List (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday March 23 2004, @07:55PM)
Free Live Cams Looking for xfree86? I deliver, and I'm live right now.
Re:Mirror List (Score:4, Funny)
(http://paradoxinc.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 09 2004, @09:18AM)
Live Now: Free cams with 'xfree86':
FREE: Get 'xfree86' at the Websites of the Hottest & Naughtiest Webcam Starlets, Hunks, Couples & Groups in the World. Click any star to visit!
Live Cams with xfree86 (free)
Re:Mirror List (Score:4, Funny)
Your post.
And I imagine THIS post will be showing up shortly. Or maybe I will be first cos I have mentioned MSN (twice).
XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
Something has gotta be wrong with that.
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.zocalo.uk.com/)
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.google.com/)
MS Links Back to Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
How not-so-strange...
Re:MS Links Back to Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
The first result was titled:
# Slashdot | MS Exec: 'Our products just aren't engineered for security'
Next Week... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next Week... (Score:5, Funny)
XFree86 porn (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computer_Go)
Dlugar
Re:XFree86 porn (Score:5, Interesting)
Seach for porn [msn.com], and you'll get the nightsurf thing. Search for nude [msn.com], and you'll also get the nightsurf warning. But- if you search for porn nude [msn.com] then you'll get no warning at all!!! This is stupid even for microsoft standards.
Search for "XFree 86" (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks more like a (stupid) bug, but then again bugs always cause undesired results.
Re:XFree86 porn (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.phor.net/)
Re:XFree86 porn (Score:5, Funny)
(http://periodthree.com/)
Why do I get the feeling that if you manually overrode the "maxlength=150" and set them a nice custom GET with "bork" 17000 times on the MSN search line, somewhere in Redmond a server will go down?
Re:XFree86 porn (Score:4, Funny)
(http://permanentink.deviantart.com/)
Re:MS Links Back to Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Now, either porn sites have something against prepositions, or Microsoft is doing something funny.
Re:MS Links Back to Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
The first result is:
Slashdot | Microsoft's Vision Of Future Workplaces
That's a disturbing thought..
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 26, @09:43PM)
I just tried "XFree86 XXX" and guess what? No porn warning and the first 15 of about 4768 links to domains like sourceforge.net, gnomedesktop.org...
The inner workings of corporate MS are truly beyond human comprehension.
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 26, @09:43PM)
You did get me wondering, so I looked at "XFree86 XXX" again. The first 45 entries were all about Linux or the X windowing system. No suggestion of pr0n at all-- very boring workaday stuff.
Combined with the adult content warning for "XFree86", I find that there is only one possible conclusion that can be drawn from the data:
Someone at Microsoft thinks that XFree86 is very, very sexy
Re:Microsoft browses slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://jackslash.blogspot.com/)
no porn warning on this one.
what a f***** up world
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://apgwoz.com/)
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.kill9.eu/)
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://jesus.everdense.com/)
Strange... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday December 23 2005, @06:30PM)
Well that is just great. Now how am I supposed to find my favorite teen shemales fisting watersports sites?
"x free 86" works... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:XFree69 (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, rather than a bug, I suspect that it's probably human error. Because the search engine only seems to match certain words as likely to return "adult" material, there's probably a human-generated list of terms. My guess is that they took a list of the top 1000 (or something) search terms, and assigned somebody to classify them as adult or not-adult. If the person was unfamiliar with XFree86, they may very well have guessed that it was related to porn (X and Free together).
In other words, the only thing I think Microsoft is guilty of here is creating a remarkably poor filter.
What's weird (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday October 23 2006, @12:44PM)
And so does XFree87 [msn.com]
Here's a search for a possible culprit - just x86 [msn.com]. Seems fine, although notice how the first 9 results are all AMD, with some impostor Intel claiming #10 spot (and it's not even Intel's site, it's Solaris on Intel document).
But back to searches for XFree86. So it wasn't the X86 part, how about
free86 [msn.com] - oh, look, XFree86.org is listed with Microsoft search engine after all. You just don't search it by name, search it by keyword that's reasonably close.
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://jackslash.blogspot.com/)
curiouser and curiouser said alice
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
As other people have said, I doubt theres any gain for MS from doing this, so it's probably a term that was tossed in by programmers for debugging purposes or just for the hell of it, rather than some sort of official policy decision.
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Funny)
"I have an alternative? And it's what?"
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.google.com/)
and that search also returned xfree86.org as the first link.
So to me it does not look like "some porn sites plastered the term "XFree86" all over themselves", but more like a suspiciously blocked search query.
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://f1-facts.com/)
Please make up a theory why "XFree86" gets the porn warning, but "XFree86 sex" doesn't. [msn.com]
Oh, yeah, now gasgesgos will say that Porn sites plaster "XFree86" all over, but never use the word "sex"...
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's weird (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Sorry, no (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 07 2004, @04:29PM)
X Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:X Windows (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday February 01 2007, @11:07AM)
I believe you mean lin---s.com [lin---s.com]
Re:X Windows (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~Hal-9001/journal/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 06, @09:20AM)
Because I'm so sure that MSN users are that smart (Score:5, Funny)
Not necessarily. This will help lock 'em in. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday November 02, @02:49PM)
Not necessarily.
If you start out as an MS user and hear about this other operating system, what is the first thing you need to do to BECOME clueful? Look it up. Right?
So you look it up, using the tool you know. And the tool refuses, and tells you it's something pornographic.
So you decide somebody's playing a joke on you and forget about it.
And you never DO become cluefull enough to download it and try it out.
And thus you never wean yourself from MSware.
And you keep buying upgrades from MS.
Multiply by millions.
Multiply by hundreds of bucks each.
Sounds like a GREAT marketing ploy.
Re:Because I'm so sure that MSN users are that sma (Score:5, Funny)
"how many people using MSN as a search engine would know a thing about XFree86?"
Apparently none, giv