This post is rated “R”
Smut Searches: How Video Alts Handle Adult Content
I can’t believe Charles made me write this piece. Okay, ‘asked’ is a better word, but still. Have you ever tried to do research on how well video search engines filter inappropriate content?
There’s really only one way to do it:
1) Pick a term you know will generate raunchy results (‘sexy babe’ was the term I went with).
2) Run search with filter on.
3) Find out how easy it is to turn filter off.
4) Run search with filter off.
5) Drop laptop on the floor so you can’t catch the cooties from the content now on your screen!
6) Clean history, cookies, cache, hands, cache again.
I’m from New York. I don’t shock easily.
But there is some nasty stuff out there, and it’s desperately easy to find.
I followed my smut-seeking process for a half-dozen up-and-coming video search engines. These sites are great for finding videos, but most of them don’t promote themselves as kid-friendly, and there’s a reason for that.
Two of the sites I visited, blinkx and clipblast!, had search filters.
The filters worked a little (soft porn instead of the full-on stuff), but they essentially worked on the honor system: the equivalent of leaving a kid with a tub of ice cream and a spoon and asking him not to spoil his appetite.
Blinkx prompted me to turn the filter off when I searched for ‘sexy babe’:
So is this company telling me is that the positive option, the OK option, is the one that generates videos like ‘sexy babe’? Imagine for a moment you’re a twelve year-old. You get a message that says, ‘Click “OK” if you’re sure you want to see naked people.’ What would you do?
Clipblast! has a similar filter in place, it’s toggled on and off: 
To blinkx and clipblast!’s credit, they were the only two of the half-dozen engines Charles suggested I look at that even gave a token nod to filtering. And I want to be really clear here: I don’t think these sites are obligated to make themselves kid proof.
And this is certainly not a new issue. As far back as 1998, Danny Sullivan was writing pieces about kid-friendly search; my own now-defunct company, ParentsConnected, offered a nationwide seminar series in 2000/2001 to try to get parents up to speed on their kids’ online activities. So I’m really not trying to slam these search engines for not doing something that isn’t necessarily their job anyway.
Conclusion
We love alts here. The fact is, video search engines are set up and designed to make it easy to find videos, not difficult. If, as a parent, you are truly concerned about what your kids are seeing online, your best bet is to create a controlled environment with technology like Glubble, which Josh Catone wrote about the other day.
I realize I’ve taken a pretty strong stance on this issue, and I’d be happy to discuss, debate and explore different viewpoints in the comments section.
What do you perceive to be the responsibility of the search engines?
Editor’s note: While Kaila was, uh, “researching” this article, I heard from another video search engine - Dabble. Dabble has a filter in the top right corner as so; right below this word.
Once the user clicks the toggle “on/off” button, and are going to
“unsafe search” the system asks them to affirm they are over 18:
Most importantly, we (Dabble) allow the community to tell us when videos are “unsafe,” to segregate those videos from regular search and browsing results to the “unsafe” side of the site.
Then I tried ChaCha, and this happened! 
That’s not what they mean!
As for me (Charles), I encourage search engines to filter out Adult content on the back end (so to speak), removing it from their index/database entirely. Censorship? I heard this one the other day; “If removing Spam (or Smut) is censorship, then by all means, call me a censor!”
Well, readers, especially you parents, now you’ve heard from Kaila, Dabble, and me.
What do you think should be done, if anything, about Adult content on Video Search?
By Kaila Colbin. Kaila blogs for VortexDNA, whose technology can improve relevance for search engines, ecommerce sites, or any other recommendation service.
One Response to “This post is rated “R””
mike says:
July 5th, 2007 at 8:48 pm filtering inappropriate content on the web is very important, especially here in china. You will never see a toggled button to switch on and off filtering on a chinese website. we just work hard to remove hardcore contents by all means from the back end–machine filtering and human eye censorship.but soft porn and some very arousive pictures are websites’ favorites…they can bring PVs so easily!! A pantyhose baby with a new car gets 100 times more clicks than a nice picture of BMW alone! TMO, soft porns are as bad as nudity. Although we’ve done a lot, it is still not a hard thing for teenages to find porn online, you just need to be a little more smart about your query choices.
