Yahoo Italy Keyword Search Problem - Censorship Or Bug?
Yahoo Italy has been denying results for searching certain search keywords, reported by Jacopo Gonzales, echoed by the Google blogs ( Inside Google, Google Blogoscoped, SearchEnginewatch.com, SEW Forum)
To summarize what's known, including some of my research:
1) A few affected words have been found: "shit", "shithead", "preteen"
2) The pattern-matching is tight - searching [shit] will be denied, but [Shit], [sHit], [shIt] and [shiT] are all fine, as well as [shit shit]
3) It's very easy to see the problem at a low-level. Searching with a denied keyword generates a HTTP 302 redirect response to the Yahoo directory, whereas anything else gives a normal HTTP 200 OK response. That is
http://it.search.yahoo.com/search?p=shit
Gives a low-level HTTP response of:
Location: http://it.search.yahoo.com/search/dir?p=shit
(which is a redirection to the directory)
Someone might want to spin through wordlists to find other words (I'll pass). Though I've found [shits] and [shitting] are affected too, as well as, err, the Nabokov character (this post has enough strange keywords!)
All in all, while some people are wondering if this is a censorship issue, it looks at least partly like a bug to me. Some wordlist has gotten misplaced - "shit" is much too mild a word to be a censorship target here.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in yahoo | on May 10, 2006 11:59 PM (Infothought permalink)
> "shit" is much too mild a word to be a censorship target here.
I could imagine this word list was included to please some politician/ gov't who didn't really check into this; a sort of cover-your-ass alibi censorship of Yahoo.it (because lots of nasty words aren't censored). Maybe the Italian gov't has stricter censorship rules? Just guessing here...
This is pure paranoia!
Grassroots journalism isn't necessarily going to replace traditional journalism, but I see that the temptation of the attention-grabbing title is just as common.
The difference is that we, the readers, can say so here and/or elsewhere.
Philipp: The problem is that many obvious words aren't on the list.
Gianni: Given all that's happened with outright goverment censorship of search engines, I don't think "pure paranoia" is a fair characterization. There's real examples of governments mandating search results be removed. So while I don't think this is such an extreme situation, I can see where people are coming from.
Attention grabbing title - well, guilty, I guess, though I'd say it's *accurate* too.