Eric Scheske from Crux Magazine, a normal Internet searcher, wrote up an entry complaining about a particular search experience. Basically he searched on the question (Ask answers questions) What's the name of the famous black transvestite? and arrived at the "Your search is likely to return adult content" page. It looks something like:
View Large ImageEric selected the last option "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." and then when the results came up, he clicked on the first link. This is his word by word description of what happened next:
Criminy! I was pounded with homosexual porn. I quickly clicked the "Back Button," and my screen was filled with more porn. I tried to close the whole internet application, and another screen of porn popped up---with about a half dozen pop up ads for porn. As my mouse flew around the screen clicking those upper-righthand X boxes, more would pop up. As it intensified, I felt like I was playing a video game�all the while afraid that one of the secretaries would walk in my office, see my screen filled with that stuff, screech in fright, and throw up her hands, thus launching a bundle of files against the wall. After thirty flurried seconds, I finally had all the porn boxes and sub-boxes closed.
At first, I felt the user was upset that such a site can get be displayed at Ask Jeeves when he selected the "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." One would expect the word "limit" would not allow for the first result to be so offensive to the user. And Jeeves received some bad press about serving porn to school kids. But the searcher was more upset with the actual pop ups and how it over took his computer. Maybe more of a reason for this user to download and use firefox. It goes to show you, that maybe, just maybe, users are blaming themselves for the bad results that show up in a search engine and not blaming the search engines.
