Spanking Blog

A Well-Aimed Riding Crop

As always, her delighted grin makes this pussy-spanking scene at least twice as sexy:

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March 19th, 2016 | No Comments »

Google Caught Telling Whoppers About Spanking Porn

I just caught Google lying about Spanking Blog. Specifically, in response to a search for a specific phrase from a randomly-selected Spanking Blog post, Google denied knowing about that post. But Google does know about that post. I can prove it with screen shots. Google is telling whoppers.

First, some history: Spanking Blog used to get a ton of search engine traffic. Type “spanking” into the search box and Spanking Blog was the first search result. But that was a dozen years ago. Recently? Not so much. Over time, Google started deprecating porn in its results, even for users who set their Google adult filter settings as permissibly as Google would allow. True spanking porn became increasingly sparse in the top ten pages of results, and porn-friendly spanking sites like this one kept sinking lower and lower. Today? Welcome to glorious page 23, baby:

Back in 2012, when this process had been underway in the web search results for some years already, Google was challenged by the public and the computer press when it started applying the newer porn-hostile algorithm to its image search service. A spokesperson denied to C|Net that the changes would block any specific adult content, but admitted making it so that queries for porn needed to be more specific:

“We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for — but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you’re looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting — you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search.”

Or, as C|Net summarized:

In other words, if you have SafeSearch turned off, you can still probably find anything you’re looking for by appending the word “porn” to your search.

Spanking Blog’s search traffic has continued to decline. Catastrophically, one might say; Google search traffic today is just a third of what it was three years ago. I had become resigned to Google’s growing hostility to porn, and so I didn’t bother to monitor that traffic closely. Nonetheless I always believed that a sufficiently-specific query would find my stuff. Sure, if there were twenty pages of non-porn results that also matched my query, Google was gonna show those twenty pages first. But if you searched for my stuff in a manner so specific that Google couldn’t find anything else responsive to show first, I thought Google would show you my stuff. Reluctantly, dragging its heels, pouting and screaming — but they would show it to you.

Yeah, no. They will not. It turns out you actually have to beg.

This morning I decided to try an experiment. I would go back to my archives and take the post from the top of each annual archive and try searching for it, just to find out how difficult Google had made things. I started with this post, from December 31, 2003:

Talk about innocent! The word “spanking” doesn’t even appear, and the post text — although suggestive of innovations in figging — is no more salacious within itself than your average sushi recipe.

Let’s Google, shall we? Google, give me everything on the internet with the phrase “evil spice-related thought” in it, willya?

And there’s the lie, folks! “No results found.”

But wait! Maybe I have so many posts in my database (more than 3,800) that Google is only keeping a representative sampling, and this one didn’t make the cut? Google used to do that sort of thing; its robots would get lost, or it would decide that saving 2,000 pages or so from a big site was sufficient. And if Google doesn’t have this post at all, then it’s not lying, it’s just mistaken.

Does Google have this post? It turns out they do:

And thus, the lie is demonstrated. Google knows about the post, but if you search for it by means of a specific quote, Google lies and says it doesn’t know about the post. Only if you include a porn keyword in addition to the quote will Google unbend enough to admit that, oh yeah, we actually have heard that phrase before, we just didn’t figure you wanted to hear about it from a stinky porn site.

And it must be porn keyword. Try a mundane keyword, one without any porn connotations, even one that actually appears in the actual post, and Google will merrily continue to lie:

If you ever used to look for interesting fetish porn by using long-tail searches, now you know why searching doesn’t turn up the obscure fetish websites any more. It’s not that the sites are gone — though they will be, soon enough, without anybody able to find them — so much as that Google doesn’t want to show them to you. And in the interest of not showing them to you, Google is more than willing to lie. “No results found.” Don’t you believe it!

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March 17th, 2016 | 12 Comments »