All entries for Tuesday 02 January 2007

TROTT's 101 Ways to Pass the Time: #42 Don't Search for Porn

It’s always amused me that if you search for something on Google (kittens, for example) and then do the search again but exclude all pages containing the word “porn” (kittens -porn in this case) the given number of results will always go down; I’ve yet to find a word or phrase that’s so innocent it hasn’t had a single encounter with a reference to porn.

However, what’s confused me about the example I’m using is that kittens returns 12,800,000 pages*, kittens -porn returns 2,680,000 pages* (~10,000,000 fewer!), but kittens porn only returns 844,000 pages*. So either Google searches don’t quite work how I think they do, or 9 million pages keep appearing and disappearing in the time it takes me to search…

(* Correct at time of writing)

: 02 Jan 2007 17:05 |  Tags: 101 Ways To Pass The Time Bizarre Bored Google Kittens Porn Randomness Trott |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Wikipedia 'doesn't ban Quatar net users'

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6224677.stm

It’s true, despite what you might have read, for example, in the BBC article I’ve linked to. As it says on the relevant talk page at Wikipedia:

If you came here from a news headline saying that Wikipedia has banned all of Qatar, please pop right back over there and post in the comments that the story is not true. This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy.

(Alright, so technically they did ban what appears to be the entire nation for a month, but only until a few hours later when another admin discovered the 1 month ban and removed it because it was blocking the whole country…)

Update: The BBC have noticed this (well, not this – they’ve noticed the comment I’m talking about…) and have updated the article.

: 02 Jan 2007 14:34 |  Tags: Ban News Quatar Randomness Wikipedia |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem