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I was surprised to find that six pages on my site (seven if you include this one) are blocked by AltaVista's "Family Filter", a technology designed to protect children from inadvertently encountering objectionable material through the AltaVista search engine. As would be expected, AltaVista does not publish the precise criteria by which pages are excluded, but the documentation does note that sites can be excluded if they relate to any of the following topics:
- Drugs, Alcohol or Tobacco
- Gambling
- Hate Speech
- Sexual Explicitness
- Violence
Armed with this knowledge, I turned Family Filter on, scoured my pages for objectionable material, and tried to divine through repeated searches the criteria under which my pages are blocked. Any of the six pages below may be blocked as a result of more terms than I have identified; the lists and findings you see show the minimum word usage I have found that will disqualify a page from inclusion in AltaVista's "family-friendly" search engine.
I invite you to read through the following and decide for yourself the accuracy and value of this technology.
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Joshua McGee's Recipes: |
Offending words: smoke, smoked, smoking, virgin
Context:
- smoke:
- "If you use more [tea, sugar, and spices] you will get more smoke"
- "You may wish to open the pot outside; there will not be billows of smoke, but there will be a very prominent smoke smell"
- smoked:
- smoking:
- "[When preparing Tea-Smoked Chicken, be sure to] keep the total amount of smoking material under 1 cup"
- virgin:
- "1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil"
Experiments and Conclusions:
- Pages containing any two of the offending words: Permitted
- Pages containing smoke, smoking, and virgin: Permitted
- Pages containing virgin which also contain both smoke and smoked or both smoked and smoking: Blocked
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Joshua McGee's Review of www.[number].com Sites
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Offending word: pornography
Context:
- A table entry noting that pornography is the subject matter for seven of the sites with numbers as domain names. I do not specifically identify these sites, and I do not provide links to them.
Experiments and Conclusions:
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Joshua McGee's CD Collection: |
Offending words: sex, Pornograffiti
Context:
- The album "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" [sic] by The Red Hot Chili Peppers (a rock band) is in my collection, as is the album "Pornograffiti" by Extreme (another rock band).
Experiments and Conclusions:
- Pages containing either of these words: Permitted
- Pages containing both of these words [there are 92 such pages]: Blocked
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Joshua McGee's Single Malts Pages:
(This commentary refers to a prior incarnation of this page and may no longer be applicable.) |
Offending words: alcohol, alcoholic, adults
Context:
- alcohol:
- "[P]lease do not imbibe alcohol [when] its use could impact the life or health of [another] person...."
- "[The fourth column indicates] [p]ercent alcohol by volume of [the] bottling."
- "[Talisker is] far hotter than its (significant) 45.6% alcohol content would suggest."
- alcoholic:
- "Please use alcoholic beverages wisely, conscientiously, and in moderation."
- adults:
- "These pages are intended to be consulted by adults of legal drinking age."
Experiments and Conclusions:
- Pages containing alcohol and/or alcoholic: Permitted
- Pages containing adults and either alcohol or alcoholic: Blocked
- The family filter worked in this situation. I agree with the page's omission; in fact, I expressly indicate on the page that it is intended solely for an adult audience. This warning is the only place in the page where adults shows up, however. It is interesting to note that had I not provided the warning, the page would most likely not have been blocked, as a search for "+alcohol +alcoholic +whisky +drinking" returns well over one thousand results with Family Filter engaged. It should also be noted that both the sortable and JavaScript-free versions of my wine tasting notes, which do not carry warnings, are accessible with Family Filter engaged.
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Joshua McGee's Hypocrisy Catalog: |
Offending words: pornography, pornographic, porn
Context:
- pornography:
- "I don't object to to consenting adults producing, distributing, and purchasing pornography, because I think the (nontrivial) effects of pornography on the perception of women are more than offset by the First Amendment ramifications of outlawing it" A somewhat ironic sentence in this context, I think.
- "Perhaps it is similar to the pornography issue in the last bullet point."
- pornographic:
- "[W]hen I was in college I interviewed for a 'computer development' job; it turned out that 80% of my work would be tranferring pornographic photographs from slide to CD-ROM so that the company could distribute them."
- porn:
- "I do not want my profession to be the dissemination of porn."
Experiments and Conclusions:
- The case of pornography is considered in detail above.
- Pages containing pornographic or porn: Blocked
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Live Recordings List: |
Offending word: rape
Context:
- rape:
- In their concert recording from 31 October 1991 in Seattle, WA, the rock band Nirvana performs their song "Rape Me". It is generally agreed that Nirvana lyricist Kurt Cobain intended the phrase "Rape Me" to be figurative, referring to the violative behavior of the mass media.
Experiments and Conclusions:
- Only one page shows up in response to a search for rape: InterestALERT's Bad News Site. It appears that, for some unfathomable reason, AltaVista special-cased this site. The site, by the way, is one I would certainly not wish my children to stumble upon accidentally.
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