I was spiffing up my black holes lecture, and wanted to show someone falling into a black hole. I already had a black hole diagram, so I just did an image search for “person falling.”
The majority of the results were of people falling from the WTC towers.
Wow.
I ended up going though page after page of them—not looking for a picture to use, just kind of stupefied.
Ever have Google show you a completely unexpected dimension of your innocent search phrase?
Failure.
Well, there’s always those times when you look up a perfectly innocent word or phrase, and get the inevitable “Not safe for work” pics and links.
Yeah, totally. I remember the time that weevils got into the ears of maize I left out to dry for Autumn decoration. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to repair the damaged kernels, so I Googled “HUGE CORN HOLES.” You would not believe the things that came up!
oh lord, tell me about it. I work in the fertility medical sector. We have a bitch of a time finding the right word combinations that don’t lead straight to the NSFW zone.
We are working with a company that makes a male fertility supplement - in a nutshell, there are some over-the-counter ingredients that actually do improve sperm morphology (i.e., increases the % of normal-shaped and functioning sperm) and this company has taken them and made a supplement tablet. Try figuring out how to market THAT on the internet without getting bundled into the whole penile-enhancement crap. Oy.
Can’t believe that Google bomb’s still up and running.
What’s up with the ‘person falling’ result? It’s really creepy.
A while back, I did a Google search for “polyarteritis nodosa” (an autoimmune disease with which I’m afflicted).
All of the top ten results were porn sites. :eek:
Seems that a lot of pornmeisters thought it would be a good idea to dump an entire medical dictionary into their entry page. For a brief time, Google was fooled, and the porn sites came up at the top of many searches for medical terms. The smart folks at Google cleaned things up quickly, though.
In a way, I was disappointed when I figured out what was going on here. For a moment, I’d said to myself “Yay! Polyarteritis nodosa isn’t so bad: now it’s sexy!”
Well, at least in this case it actually was images of people falling. (Be careful what you wish for.) There was a lot of media coverage of the event, and, sadly, a more than a few people driven to jump. And it’s the sort of thing that people have a morbid interest in (me included, apparently) so it stands to reason that there would be a lot of links to them from blogs and things . . .
This was pre-Google, but I had a weird experience once with a web-search. I recalled an article I’d read on a Delta in-flight magazine about a town in western France which is a mecca for copper cookware, but couldn’t remember the name of the town. So I did a search on “French copper pots” and got back, at work, a message that “This site is blocked…”
For the life of me I still can’t figure out what was so objectionable about French copper cookware that would result in banning a site.
Even worse I called the number given for in case this happened in error, and someone I knew answered the phone (surprising given the size of our company). And I couldn’t get her to let me have her job as the pr0n police. I’d still be working there if they’d let me be the ultimate arbiter of what was and wasn’t objectionable.
Just yesterday I wanted to find some info about LaTeX, so I just took a guess at a likely website: www(dot)latex(dot)net. NSFW, folks.
I was trying to remember the name for a particular style of dress identified with Asian women. I tried Googling images for various words I thught might be right.
I pretty quickly discovered that you’re taking your retinas into your own hands if you Google ANY word associated with women’s fashion.
snort
I thought you were surprised by what happened when you Googled “Black Holes”.
Thank you, Ludovic, but I’ve been an astronomer with internet access since 1994.
I’m aware what happens when you search for ‘black hole.’
I consider a job perk. bokka chicka bokka chicka bawm chicka waaa-waaa
I was visiting my step-mother’s third grade classroom on the day that she was teaching about animals that live in the Chesapeake Bay, including crabs. One of the kids had a question about crabs that she didn’t know the answer to. Being the ever helpful step-daughter that I am, I offered to google it for her. Of course, I totally wasn’t thinking about the fact that crabs also refer to pubic lice. :smack:
About six months ago, I got a new dog. He’d been in an abusive home before he came to be with us, and had some problems. I needed advice on how to deal with it, so I did a search for “submissive urination.”
Apparently, those words have a secondary meaning which I had not considered.
Áo dài ?
I once googled a friend’s name. She’s a journalist and I was hoping to find articles she’d written. The first hit on the list led me to wonder if she had a secret parallel career as a porn star. :eek:
I don’t get it. 
If you google failure, the first link is a biography the United States’ esteemed 43rd president.
-Mosquito
PS-We’ve only had 43 presidents in the US, so guess who the biography is about.