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When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?

Monday February 01, 2010

A blocklist update issued today includes a new feature that allows Guardian users to block the auto-suggest feature on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and YouTube.

Why? The benefits of Search-Suggest don't outweigh the downsides. The keystroke-saving feature works by offering suggestions based on popular search terms. Although Google claim to filter out 'pornographic terms, dirty words, hate and violence terms' from search suggestions, with several hundred million searches a day and thousands of profanities, this can never be an exact science. As a result, many suggestions are unsavory or lead to inappropriate content and many more encourage timewasting with amusing or intriguing suggestions which are simply too tempting for school age users and serial cyberskivers to resist.

A number of sites now exist purely to showcase a selection of silly suggestion discoveries - some of which even the most serious of web users would find it difficult not to investigate. For example, typing 'When will j' into Google offers 'When will Jesus bring the pork chops?'..! A veritable plethora of similarly intriguing search strings are out there, begging to be found, and what starts with a simple click to satisfy a burning curiosity, can quickly turn into hours of wasted time on the web.

Interestingly, earlier this month this same typeahead technology led to accusations of censorship when Google suggestions stopped appearing for the phrase 'Islam is' (despite plenty of suggestions for similar queries on other religions). Google claims this was down to a bug - which they now seem to have very quietly fixed as last week suggestions for this phrase suddenly started reappearing. Whatever the cause, Google has clearly decided against censoring now since the content of the reinstated suggestions is still just as questionable - and in our opinion, should be blocked.

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The SmoothWall family of Internet security solutions helps schools, enterprises and small/medium businesses to prevent misuse, block objectionable content and protect against web related threats. Delivered and supported via a global network of partners in over 60 countries, SmoothWall's commercial and open source solutions now safeguard more than a million networks worldwide.

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