Google Base cuts down on porn

Written by Wil Harris

November 24, 2005 | 15:50

Tags: #base #bug #craigslist #glitch #porn #xxx

Companies: #ebay #google

A problem with Google's SafeSearch feature resulted in Google Base drowning in porn earlier in this week. Google claim that the technical hitch has been fixed, and things are now back to normal.

Google Base is a new service designed to rival other offerings such as CraigsList and Ebay. It allows users to post up articles, photos, classified ads, rooms for rent, or anything else. It seems like porn marketers are using it to post up plenty ot pointers to their pay-sites, in the hope of catching interested early adopters of Google Base into spending some coins with them.

Normally, Google's SafeSearch filters out adult-oriented results (a feature which works across all the rest of Google, such as Images, as well as Base). However, it appears like a gremlin in the works b0rked SafeSearch for the night, resulting in a deluge of adult content.

This from Cnet:

""Yesterday evening, we became aware of a problem with the Google Base SafeSearch feature and we acted quickly to resolve the issue," Google spokesman Nate Tyler said via an e-mail on Wednesday. He said the filter feature was broken for "some period of time," but declined to further specify.

Todd Ripley, a real estate investor in Asheville, N.C., noticed the problem on Tuesday morning after he uploaded photos of his 2-year-old daughter Jasmine onto his Google Base page. He planned to direct his family to the page but decided against it after a search for "Jasmine" turned up some unsavory results despite the use of the SafeSearch filter.

"I was just shocked," Ripley said. "I was inundated with page after page after page of basically porn sites.""


So, on the minus side, Google breaks, some guy gets annoyed. On the plus side... free porn!

Have you used Google Base yet? What do you make of it? Tell us about your experiences (not of free porn, though) in the forums.
Discuss this in the forums
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