A couple of years ago at her work, my wife and a coworker were trying to remember the manufacturer of a line of soap products they carried in the store. Googling “Dirty Girls” did not give them the results they were looking for.
A decade ago in law school, a friend was hoping that Black’s Law Dictionary had an online version. When www.blackslawdictionary.com and www.blackslaw.com didn’t work (the first one does now), he tried shortening it further.
–Cliffy
Actually, the meaning of the expression “porn” has become more general recently.
There is a website which is dedicated to screenshots of desktops on Unix and Linux PCs under the URL: http://www.unixporn.com
And a subreddit (on reddit.com) with a collection of historical photographs is called history porn: http://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn
(Both websites are absolutely safe for work, BTW).
Looks like Google Safe Search settings could have saved some folks in here. I’m a prude now - mine’s not set high but it’s not off either. Don’t like random funky pictures when I do a “normal” search.
In junior high everyone used to try the whitehouse.com one on people in class - that one no longer works it appears.
About ten years ago I was on a very low-sodium diet, and was looking into getting a deli slicer or something, some way I could quickly cut up a roast or whatever to use as lunch meat. I Googled “shaving meat” or something similar, I don’t remember exactly. I just remember the results were not at all what I was expecting.
I had the same problem when I looked into getting a sausage stuffer.
And cocks. Well, as long as Safe Search is on.
Yeah because the actual White House bought them out. I always wondered how much $$ they got for that domain.
It doesn’t appear that whitehouse.com is owned by the federal government. But there is no more porn either.
I always found it strange that the government doesn’t have some kind of legal hold to prevent a shady entrepreneur from hosting a porn site or maybe a fraudulent website under a domain which is easily confused with an official website by the general public.
I made that same mistake once.
On a work computer.
About a week after the email went out from IT that “we’re going to start reviewing staff web activity to see if there are issues we need to address.”
In looking for supplies for my horses & dogs, I’ve discovered that certain phrases, when not accompanied by the word ‘dog’ or ‘horse’, can get interesting results:
leather halter
leather hobbles
collar (leather, chain, or choke)
furry pad
to name a few…
Well, the White House is not a .commercial enterprise but a .government institution, so why should it have more of a claim on whitehouse.com than a commercial magazine called Whitehouse? The magazine existed long before the WWW.
You know, it’s strange, because now it’s a blank page with stock photos of the actual White House, with the registrar listed as “FABULOUS.COM PTY LTD” and the registrant “Internet Source LLC”. But I am certain that some time ago, whitehouse.com was automatically redirecting to whitehouse.gov. Which would indicate that the Feds did have a hold on it. I can’t imagine why they’d give up that domain.
The Whitehouse.com porn site actually arose from a satirical reference to Mrs Mary Whitehouse, a campaigner against sexual innuendo and explicit references to sex in television programmes, active in Britain during the 1970s. She was very well known, and quite influential, but also much mocked. (She famously gets name checked in the Pink Floyd song “Pigs.” Many Americans seem to believe this is a reference to their presidency; it is not.) In the spirit of this widespread mockery of her, a fairly widely distributed British soft-core porn magazine, that began publication in the 1970s, was named Whitehouse. It was widely available in British newsagents. I do not know it for a fact, but I would be very surprised if the whitehouse.com porn site that later emerged, in the fairly early days of the Web, was not closely connected with that magazine.
A famous statement associated with Mrs Whitehouse was (something like) “We know people get up to all sorts of sexual practices in the privacy of their own homes. We are not concerned with that. We just don’t want it on the television, crammed down our throats all the time.” (Probably apocryphal, but quite in line with her actual position.)
I can confirm that penisland.com was indeed a real site, and was ostensibly concerned with pens. It was online for quite a few years. It was a deliberate joke, however (although totally straightfaced). The only real giveaway was that there was no way to actually buy any of the pens that it purported to be selling. I am fairly sure than no penises were actually to be seen there.
I have a sneaking suspicion that with safe search off, even adding ‘dog’ or ‘horse’ (or worse ‘pony’ or ‘puppy’) will still get you interesting results…
There are penises to be seen everywhere, my friend, if you know where to look.
I had heard of a hardware/fastener company called “Mutual Screw”. I typed it into Google here at work and a lot of interesting sites popped up. Many that were “blocked”. I can hardly wait to hear from the IT people.
Mutual Screw should really sell T shirts with their logo on them… I’d buy one!
I was also looking up the Lyrics for the Eagles song “The Greeks don’t want no freaks”. That was interesting as well! :eek:
Just a couple of years ago, I wanted images of the Greek mythological female beings ‘nymphs’- SafeSearch was not on.
I hit the Closer Browser button SO FAST!!!
In related news, over a decade ago when the Net was new, our church youth pastor cautioned us that searching for lyrics to a song about God-devoted teenagers entitled “Extreme Teens” had to be quite carefully done.
I just tried the latter, and I realized I had misremembered- the group was called “Extreme Teens”- and apparently they had released a Christian CD AND cassette in 1996. It seems to have been their only product. I wonder if they had renamed themselves soon after. L
This happened in the late 90’s - it may not have even been google, but Yahoo or AltaVista.
That setup is required so that you believe the level of innocence I held when I decided to search for old jazz music with the search term scat.
I went to an industry con a decade or so ago and one of the vendors was selling rack mountable servers, and giving away T-Shirts that said “Nice Rack”. Of course, we didn’t care about the product, but he made us stand thru a very short spiel about the company before he gave out the shirts 