An interesting thread at Google Web Search Help started by "anotherDad" tells the story of how a father was shocked to see a pornographic site come up in the Google search results for a search for his daughter's name. He said:
I recently did a Google search on my daughter's name, and was surprised when one of the URL's returned by the search forwards to a porn site when clicked.
What this father quickly learned was that this site that was showing up had a cached page that contained the honor roll of his daughter's class. That cache page contained his daughter's name on it. What was likely happening was that either the URL was taken over by a spammer and Google has not updated their index yet or the page is being cloaked, in a very bad way.
I love this post because it shows how a normal searcher was shocked by this. Let me share his thoughts, after learning a bit on how Google operates.
I originally thought that the Google crawlers might have made a false association. I now believe that the Google crawler had nothing to do with the bad links. I now believe that the offending links between my daughter's name and the porn site were generated by hackers/pranksters or a perhaps by a dodgy webmaster who is alligned with the porn site.He then added his two cents for Google:
I have a couple of suggestions for Google. I think it is relatively hard to find the corrent Google help pages and the corrent Google help forum for problems like mine. People like me who are not IT professionals don't have all day to look around every pocket of Google (and there's a lot there) for help. I also think that the "contact us" link is misleading. I think it is unusual for a corporation as big and important as Google not to have some kind of customer service for cases like mine.
This searcher is exactly the type of person Google takes seriously and it is always interesting to read posts by them. Especially when it is so close to home and so important to them.
In the end, Google was wrong - his daughter is not a porn star and the father can somewhat rest a bit easier at night.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.
Update: JohnMu from Google commented below stating there is a special form for this at Google.
