MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?

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'?"

Comments

And people wonder why I worry

[Dark Paladin]

Not that I believe that Google is really doing their service out of the goodness from their hearts - they're doing it to make money.

But people wonder why I don't want to see a Micorosft Internet Search built into Windows (oh, and made so you can't remove it without damaging the operating system, like you can't remove IE or Media Player or anything else Microsoft decides is essential).

Call me crazy, but MS seems to have this weird habit of shutting down things they don't like. Is this just a stupid mistake? It could be - I mean, block things starting with X to keep kids from porn, right?

Oops - but Xfree85 works, so that can't be it.

MS gives away IE to shut down Netscape. That wasn't the crime that I thought was terrible - it was going to their OEM partners and threatening them with extra high cost of Windows if they put on Netscape.

So if they should take over the search world, can we really trust it to reflect accurately? I'm all for giving something a fair shake, but if before the game really starts they're already blocking alternate product possibilities I think "trust" is something that won't apply to MSN search.

Of course, I could be wrong. Could just be a simple misunderstanding.

Sadly, even if it is, based on their past history, I don't think I could believe that's it.

Re:And people wonder why I worry

[Awptimus Prime]

MS gives away IE to shut down Netscape. That wasn't the crime that I thought was terrible - it was going to their OEM partners and threatening them with extra high cost of Windows if they put on Netscape.

It's refreshing to see another person not consider the Netscape fiasco a 'crime'. I was working for an ISP when IE came about. At the time, Netscape charged us $20-40 per copy that we shipped to our customers. You can imagine how quickly that adds up. When IE became an alternative, Netscape refused to negociate and lost out big-time. Meanwhile, MS would do advertising partnerships and offer a wide range of support services for free. A very tempting offer when your shop isn't making much money to begin with.

Anyway, the people at Netscape didn't move quickly to improve their browsers and, for quite some time, IE was way better concerning stability in Windows. It's not like the 2 clicks and 10 minute download destroyed them.

The anti-MS folks who always find fault in MS never really seemed to complain about Trumpet Winsock being put through the ringer by NT and 95 including their own network stacks. How about notepad.exe and calc.exe? Before that time, you could download and register shareware editors or look for freebies. I've never heard somone argue that Windows was destroying software companies by including it's own program to display image files.

But anything to do with [potentially] commerical media, such as web pages and audio/video content, grabs everyones attention and ends up with MS back in court acting confused and innocent.

I know, totally off topic. Back on topic, I promise:

I think the reason for the search results problem is likely a goof-up. Likely a low-level employee who had no idea what XFree86 is, didn't care, didn't double-check, etc before adding it to the DB. It seems reasonable that many MS employees would not be familar with Unix at all.

Re:What's weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Because lots of porn deals with 18 year olds, and the birthdate of someone 18 this year is 1986 that could be one, possible, if very far afield theory.

Not necessarily. This will help lock 'em in.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

If you have reached a level of cluefulness where you need to find information on Xfree86 then you are using Google as well.

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:XFree69

[aardvarkjoe]

I suspect it's probably a bug instead of malicious intent...

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.