4 ms·
Back in the 90s, search engines were notorious for serving back lots of porn links interspersed with whatever thing you were looking for. I was unusual (appare
by curtis 9y ago
Back in the 90s, search engines were notorious for serving back lots of porn links interspersed with whatever thing you were looking for. I was unusual (apparently) in that my searches tended to be really specific and I rarely got a lot of porn results. Except one time. I was looking for information on gun violence in Europe and I was getting back not just a few porn results, but lots and lots of them. I was using really simple queries, so I was able to quickly isolate the offending term.
It was: "Sweden".
(Most likely this was on Alta Vista, not Google, but I don't remember for sure.)
- gaius 9y agoThis is because marketing weasels had just discovered the hottest new tech of the day: meta tags. And immediately set about polluting them. At one point in the mid 90s about half the web that existed at the time was tagged “Anna Kournikova naked”. (Probably many on HN are too young to remember her... imagine Taylor Swift x10, that was her popularity back then)