Things you googled in innocence?

In My Humble Opinion
21

About 13 years ago I was working tech support. The computers were locked down in odd ways, in that admin would go ahead and block sites as they noticed them being abused, rather than locking down everything and only admitting work-related sites. We had a LOT of work-related sites though, everything from drivers to help sites we could direct customers to, so it was easier to just lock down as necessary, I guess.

But you’re talking about a room full of over 100 relatively tech-savvy people, and we were ALWAYS looking for ways around things. Think it took upper management a year to figure out what ‘anonymizer’ was, for example. :smiley: Anyway, it was a big no-no to be screwing around where you’re not supposed to, but we did anyway.

One night I was working a late shift and it was actually SLOW, which didn’t happen often. This was before Google, though other search engines like Dogpile were out there.

I was bored enough to just see what happened when you typed a random numerical address into the address bar.

So I typed ‘00000000’

And of course, my screen immediately starts popping up sex ads, proliferating at such a rate that I couldn’t close them, couldn’t do ANYthing. If this had happened during the day, when everyone was there, I would probably been fired on the spot. (Except I was SUCH a dork, and female, that they’d probably believe it WAS an accident) So I just turned the whole thing off, praying the phone wouldn’t ring, and boom, it was 10:00, time to go home. Whew!!

I remembered that I had to retrieve something from email first, so I turned it back on…and my entire machine was full of pr0n. I was soooo panicked. Luckily the one manager left on shift laughed his ass off about it, and we spent the next half hour sanitizing the damn machine.

Oh, and don’t type in whitehouse.com either. I don’t know if it’s changed, but yeah. Don’t go there. Not while at work, anyway!

22

I learned the hard way that doing Google Image searches for “kitten”, “Tasmanian devil”, and “Xenakis” (a 20th-century composer) result in disturbing images.

23

I was looking for tits one time and all I got were pictures of birds.

24

What’s a jennifer site?

25

That happens with boobies, too.

26

I was at work looking online for a church that a friend of mine runs and wound up at a Korean porn site. Luckily no one investigated. No one would believe the church story. (I can’t remember, but it was called Ridgewood or something similar and I probably typed in a variation of that).

27

When I was a student, the physics paper archive used to be hosted at xxx.lanl.gov. But because by that point almost every other web address had a “www” prefix, it was easy for either humans or browsers to misinput, with predictable results.

28

There is a day care here called “Little Beavers”.

29

Once looked up some basic financial mathematics under “Black Model”.

30

My friend once looked it up as “dicks sporting dot com”. She sent a text basically saying dicks sporting dot com is not the url for Dick’s Sporting Goods. Also, my new employer does not have firewalls in place.

My daughter went through a phase where she only wanted underwear that was very plain—no princesses or girly prints or pastel colors—which is difficult to find for a little kid (thank goodness for girls’ boxers, which she now wears exclusively!) Anyhow, in his quest to be helpful, my husband googled “plain girls underpants” at work. He then immediately realized what a collosally bad idea that was.

31

I remember many years ago, a funny guy owned a domain name which consisted of the words: xxxpics (I don’t recall the exact domain name). Turned out the website contained pictures, paintings and drawings of the letter X in all shapes and forms, totally innocent.

This individual finally gave up the domain because it drew a lot of traffic, costing him too much money.

32

In the inverse, http://craneporn.org/ is made up entirely of photos of construction cranes.

33

Awww. . .them’s cute lil beavers.

34

Some years ago my mother-in-law asked for help with research for a professional paper she was writing for her work as an administrator at a psychiatric hospital. She wanted information on the history of the use of leather restraints in hospitals in general, and psychiatric hospitals in particular.

Her son/my husband simply typed “leather restraints” in the search box and almost immediately regretted it.

35

I just got a pet rabbit a week ago and he’s been settling in nicely except for one thing. Whenever he would lie down to relax, he would vibrate and twitch quite a bit and I was kind of worried. Note to self: don’t google ‘vibrating rabbit’ unless you want to see lots of hits for vibrators.

After some refinement to my search terms, it turns out rabbits vibrate when they’re too hot. He’s currently snuggled up to a bottle of frozen water and all is well.

36

Cyberbears . com (hairy gay men) is quite a different site than Cyberbears.org (online California Bears Fan site). I was at WORK when I found that out.

37

I’m a hairy gay man AND a Cal grad. What do I win?

38

The thread, I think! :stuck_out_tongue:

39

Especially since he only had to type “lea” before it auto-completed from his history?

40

I look up kittens all the time to calm myself down, and even with safe search you still get pictures of scantily-clad girls.

Also if you look up kittens in Google News, you will get a lot of gossipy garbage about sex kittens.