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Doing a "safe search" for e.g. "great tits" (which is a kind of bird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tit) used to suppress pictures of naked breasts. That, surely, was the point of 'Safe Search', but it appears to be no longer the case. Now it just removes the word "tits" from the search. And indeed, searching in safe mode for "great breasts" produces NSFW material. The word lists seems global: the localized google page suppresses the same terms as google.com: "tits", "tetas", etc. What gives? Why would they do something like that? I couldn't find anything on their blog pages.
Source of the discovery: http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/google-safe-search-is-a-barrier-to-ornithology/1572
[Editor's Note: Using Google in UK and France appears to work exactly as it did before, showing the expected ornithological results and no NSFW links. Perhaps this is not quite as simple an explanation as the submitter first thought.]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Popeidol on Wednesday July 16 2014, @01:23AM
The same effect can be seen on google.com.au so this isn't an isolated case.
Last I checked, they've been going in this direction for quite a while: less user-modifiable settings, more dynamic interpretation of what they think you mean
You may recall that safesearch used to have three settings - off, moderate, or strict. This gave you imperfect but direct control over the amount of naughty material you'd see in your searches. More recently, they replaced that with a single option to 'filter explicit results', on or off.
The thing is, google still filters explicit images out even when it's set to off. If you're searching something that could possibly be innocent (try 'jenna jameson', the worlds most famous porn star), google returns almost identical results regardless of whether the filter is on. If you want to actually see the explicit results, you have to add a key word like 'porn' or 'naked'. This applies across their whole image search. Google images is safe-search only unless you use what google identifies as a dirty word.
Given explicitness is filtered by default anyway, what's the point of a 'filter explicit results' option? It looks like they've decided: It's to make sure you never, ever see anything that might offend you. Even if you're looking for the birds, looking for 'great tits' will probably turn up some women by accident - so they remove the word for you, for your own safety. You could use it as a 'net nanny' feature, except it can be disabled in under a second.
I can't say I like the option but it doesn't make much of a difference. If you want the old safe search experience, just disable safe search.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2014, @01:49AM
"If you want the old safe search experience, just disable safe search."
And if you wand the old no safe search (less censored) experience? I've noticed that bing still has an "off" setting on their safe search that works as expected. I never thought the day would come that bing actually offered more transparency and utility than google in some case, but it happened. The worse google gets, the easier it is to out perform them.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Wednesday July 16 2014, @03:36AM
As far as I know, there is no way to go back to the completely uncensored result in google. There might still be a URL query option hanging around if you can find it: the old '&safe=' accepts 'active', 'moderate', and 'off'; but they seem to have been mapped to the two new modes. If there's a secret fourth option nobody has found it yet. For now, if you want unfiltered results google is not the best option.
(As a sidenote, I was wrong earlier. Apparently you can lock safesearch [google.com], so this change makes it a basic-yet-functional filter and may be linked to the parental controls [omgchrome.com] they've recently built into chromeOS)
(Score: 2) by DrMag on Wednesday July 16 2014, @12:36PM
Until someone figures out how to use incognito modes--it circumvents safesearch completely along with the feature of not leaving a cached history to observe later. If you want content filtering, you really need a dedicated firewall setup.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 16 2014, @10:21PM
This sounds like another good case for the implementation of my Just Fucking Do It button (patent pending). Some sort of search mode where it automatically quotes all the words in the query for you before submitting or something...
cf. when app makers started getting Firefox to install add-ons so you couldn't remove them easily. You use the Just Fucking Do It button to rip them out of the registry and collateral damage be damned.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"