Wed, 2010-09-08 17:39

So economics blogger Felix Salmon mentioned that economics blogger Tyler Cowen had tweeted that the new Google Instant feature might be more a distraction than a benefit.

Salmon quoted Google’s Matt Cutts on how he thinks Instant is instead a powerful and useful research tool

I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Ben Gomes mentioned this during the Q&A, but with Google Instant I find myself digging into a query more. Take a query like [roth ira v]. That brings up Autocomplete suggestions like [roth ira vs traditional ira], [roth ira vanguard], and [roth ira vs 401k]. Suddenly I’m able to explore those queries more just by pressing the up/down arrow key. I can get a preview of what the results will be, add or subtract words to modify my query, and hit enter at any time… When I was in grad school, I had a professor who mentioned that peoples’ information need often change over the course of a search session. Google Instant makes that process even easier: people can dig into a topic and find out new areas to explore with very little work.

Matt Cutts said it here.

Felix Salmon uses Cutts to bolster his claim that, as a blogger, Cowen might enjoy the benefits of the “serendipitous diversions” he frets might instead… well… divert him.

Well gee, I’m a blogger too so I’m pretty excited about the possibilities Cutts, Cowen, and Salmon endorse.

So giving it a try I went to the Google Instant page and gave it a quick whorl.

So I first started typing “Tyler Cowen” and sure enough, before I’d made it to “Tyler Co” there was the first reference to Cowen, and by the time I’d typed his full name I’d discovered (ok, confirmed) that in addition to being a voracious reader, prolific blogger, and political libertarian he’s also deeply interested in autism. Good call.

Then I started typing “Felix Salmon.” And oh boy, that was even quicker — he was first up in the list by the time I’d typed “Felix S!” And with just a little more twiddling I discovered that not only does he use the phrase “recipe for disaster” I stumbled across a vaguely interesting link to alternatives to salmon at a somewhat automated-looking site called Halibut-Recipies-on-line.com (no link since I’m not vouching for it.) So that’s a distraction if not an entirely serendipitous one.

Anyway, that was all going so well I thought I’d start typing “Tony Comstock.”

Now the funny thing is that I got… nothing! Google Instant has nothing at all to say about Tony.

Which is kind of funny since roughly two years ago Comstock, a former war documentary filmmaker who now tries to make a living making erotic documentaries of non-Hollywood-looking, ordinary couples, has actually been in correspondence with none other than Matt Cutts! On a topic (Google’s type-ahead tips) not at all unlike this one. Nor is that the only link — their correspondence was followed fairly closely around both the sex-oriented and non-sex-oriented (e.g. James Fallows) blogosphere.

Feh.

So no Tony Comstock in Google Instant. Fine. I blog a lot about relationships, gender, and sex so… I figured I’d search Google Instant for something fairly common to couples in relationships. Fellatio? Nope, no Google Instant. How about cunnilingus? Nope. Ok, how about sweet old ordinary “naked?” Eh, not that either.

Eh. Fine again, Google is obviously trying to be sensitive about topics that might disturb sensitive people. And children.

So…

I decided to confirm this by trying Google Instant on something that disturbs me enormously: “decapitation.”

Uh oh! Oh, that’s very bad. More than I really wanted to know! And waaaayyy too instantly!

Worse? By the time you’ve typed “graphic beh” you get items #1, “graphic beheading.” Worse still? Instant anticipated item #2? That would be “graphic beheading videos!“

Changing direction for a moment, how ‘bout rectal tears? Eww, yup. Though (mercifully?) no anal fissures.

Violent sexual assault? Eww, that cheerfully pops up too! (But you have to type through the empty Instant desert of “violent sex” to get there.)

And, gross, turns out by the type you type the letters “lynchi” “lynching photos” is item number two!

All pretty darned offensive and disturbing if you ask me.

And not the usual bailiwick for this blog so even assuming there was some kind of positive “serendipitous distractions” in the department of inhuman violence those latter instant keywords wouldn’t do me a bit of good.

Last call? Does “orgasm” show up in Google Instant? Not even faked ones!

No help for me then. No help for Comstock either.

Instantly helpful for the Klan and other racists, Al Qaeda and other beheaders though. Good job Google!

Update: Not sure where this fits in but if you look up the classic quip about movie rating systems, it turns out that Google Instant renders results for both “kiss breast” and “cut off breast.” Not much of an attaboy but at least they’re not as knee-squeezingly adolescent as the MPAA’s ratings guidelines.

Update #2: As QoB points out in comments to this post, it turns out that as I began writing this post Lux Alptraum had already done a post on Google Instant’s red-light districting over on (duh, not work-safe if you dislike cliché porn images) Fleshbot. But of course I wouldn’t have seen it with Google Instant because it returns hits for neither “Lux Alptraum” nor “Fleshbot.”

Though it turns out if you try the keywords “Google Instant Red-light” you do find an unfiltered version of Alptraum’s post at a mirrored livejournal feed. Though I’m sure the folks at Google would argue that hey, no sexuality-related filtering algorithm is perfect… but they’re working on it. Just wish they’d work as hard on their beheading-video filters!