yo yo yo search it!

Friday, January 20, 2006

i'm NOT a child and if i want to surf for porn i will

and i don't want the bushwhacked extended family sticking their noses into MY PERSONAL BID-NEZ
someone please pinch me. every day when i wake up i think i'm in communist china, or cuba or north korea or russia in 1975.

Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes
NOTE: We're continuing to update this news through postscripts below the original story.
Via
John Battelle and Google Morning Silicon Valley, the San Jose Mercury News article "Feds want Google search records" covers the Bush administration demanding last year that Google and other search engines turn over aggregate search information to help revive a child protection law. Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. A motion has been filed this week by US Department Of Justice to force Google to hand over the data.
In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do.
Here's a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.
Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.
Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you've asked for a lot of data that's not really going to help you estimate anything at all.
Far better would be to do some searches that you think children and teens are actually doing, such as by doing a survey of them. Then just go start searching on Google and the other search engines yourselves. See what actually comes up, especially when the filtering protection each service offers is enabled. That would give you plenty of data, plus it would be useful for everyone to have someone rigorously test the filtering systems that are offered. Serving subpoenas to get the data isn't necessary.........

No comments: