Carl Kinsella | Staff Writer
This is a bad day for students. In fact, it’s a bad day for anyone with a hard drive and a sex drive. On the night of January 25th, Google has made every teenager’s second-worst net-based fear a reality. That’s right, Google have stopped just short of showing your browser ‘History’ to your proud parents and loving partner and made SafeSearch a permanent fixture. You read that right. Permanent. Is your mouth dry? Have you broken into a cold sweat? Are you about to see if you can use Yahoo instead? Well, then, you’re probably a little too concerned for comfort. But you should be irked, to say the least.
Where internet users, eager to scope out the avenues of cyberspace of which we dare not speak, were once given the option to choose ‘strict’, ‘moderate’ or ‘no’ filtering of search results – they are now only given two options: ‘SafeSearch’ or ‘Filter Explicit Material’. Trust me, Google. If I search ‘boobs’ and can’t see a nipple in ten pages of image results (approximately 400 boobs), the explicit material is well and truly filtered already. I assume if you search ‘boobs’ after selecting ‘Filter Explicit Material’ your result will be one lone close up of an Irish mammy giving you a face that would put the fear of God into you. Instead, you’d surely be better off finding the various porn sites online such as bro xxx and others to find pictures and videos of boobs and other explicit content.
As easy as it is to make jokes about what is essentially the obscuring of pornographical images from very plain view, there are larger issues at stake. Google is a company that is built on an ethos of ‘understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you want’, according to its own co-founder and CEO Larry Page. When the tenth highest image result for ‘Boobs’ is a picture of US President Barack Obama, it’s fair to say that Mr. Page and friends are failing to carry out their mission statement. How can a search engine that has built its success on the freedom of expression and ideas provided for by the internet possibly justify limiting search results to the point you no longer get what you ask for? If people wanted to search for ‘boobs’ and get a picture of a naked man in a children’s paddling pool then someone other than the more computer-illiterate parents out there would use Bing. And nobody does.
To put this debacle in perspective, simply imagine walking into Pizza Hut and ordering a pizza. You want anchovies, you want pineapple, you want pepperoni, you want tandoori chicken. You want it all. Sure, it’s unorthodox, but your money is how they pay rent and they have all the ingredients in the kitchen. In no walk of life is it acceptable for a business to ignore your order for a product they have in stock, instead preferring to present you with something it thinks will increase your moral standing. This holds true no matter how unconventional your taste in porn. Pizza. I mean pizza.
Of course, there is no need to storm Google’s headquarters over this lone transgression. Some out there may even welcome these new restrictions, which are now imposed worldwide (having begun several months ago in the USA). There is a moral argument to be had over ease-of-access to explicit materials. However, that is not the immediate issue as realistically porn, and all the other stuff people use the internet for after staring at Blackboard for ten minutes, will still be easy to find. What will grate with many is the idea of roadblocks finally being erected all over the information superhighway and the failure of one of cyberspace’s greatest giants to live up to its promise. After all, people that are wanting to find pornographic material such as can be seen on watch my gf as an example, will still be able to navigate towards it somehow.
Nobody struggles to understand why explicit materials are deemed explicit. Nor does anybody struggle to understand why a mother wouldn’t want her children browsing the internet in search of such materials. Surely, one final thing nobody can dispute is that multi-billion dollar companies like Google do not and cannot decide what it is that people should or should not search. By implementing this new restriction, Google has waded into the world of deciding what we should and should not see and the slope is slippery for all the wrong reasons.
Being serious for a moment, I can reluctantly accept that boobs aren’t all that important – but what happens when Google decides it favours a certain political party? When Mr. Page decides he leans so strongly towards pro-life that he might just hide a few pro-choice search results? Anyone who has ever watched a news channel or read a newspaper has plainly seen evidence of bias infiltrating the media – men in suits shaping the agenda so that we only know what they want us to know. The internet is supposed to give us freedom to discover for ourselves, if nothing else. And maybe it still does, but you’ll have to try Bing. And let’s be honest, Bing is rubbish.
