THERE GOES MICROSOFT again, trying to be all things to all people:
Attention families! Microsoft Network is friendly to your cause. To see what we mean, go to MSN Search and type in “naked woman.” As you will see, we filter searches; you’ll immediately go to a barrier page that warns you that the search you’ve entered is “likely to return adult content.” If that’s the kind of thing you want, we’ll send you to NightSurf, an “independent adult search service.” If you want another, less problematic kind of naked woman, you can click through to MSN’s six search results: a MIDI page, a story about Jimmy Smits’ bare butt, two foot-aficionado pages, a women’s soccer Web site, and a Bif Naked fan offering. We’re so family-friendly!
Attention anticensorship folk! Microsoft Network is friendly to your cause. To see what we mean, go to MSN Search and type in “naked girls.” As you will see, we don’t filter searches; you’ll immediately go to an MSN page that tells you we’ve got about 1.4 million pages that’ll give you everything from girl-on-girl action to multiple blow jobs. We’re so First Amendment-friendly!
David K. was looking for a porn site on MSN. Specifically, he was looking for his porn site, Nightcharm. Part of running a well-attended site is making sure you’re hooked up to the searches people use. His site is present and accounted for, but a little checking around showed that not all MSN searches were headed in the same direction—a number of searches, though by no means all of them (more on that in a minute), were diverted through the aforementioned NightSurf, a Florida-based search where once you start clicking, it’s hard to stop . . . literally.
One false move on NightSurf and your browser is off to the races, opening (in our tests) 35 unrequested browser windows before we could bail our frantic, grossed-out, never-want-to-see-a-naked-person-again-as-long-as-we-live selves out of the avalanche.
Interesting thing about those links, though: We ran our mouse over them to see the URLs and noticed that the referral code (which tells NightSurf where the visitor came from and can, if the deal is set up to do so, credit the referring site’s account with actual cash) pointed right back to MSN, as (for instance) banner ads do for Web sites that run them. (Microsoft declined comment on any financial arrangement they might have with NightSurf.)
THE LAST THING Microsoft wants is to be perceived as “in the porn business”—using NightSurf as a feint is designed to wave people away (however ineptly) from a certain amount of that stuff. And NightSurf itself claims on their site to be registered with NetNanny and other filtering services, and is rated by the Recreational Software Advisory Council, which rates Web site content. Problem is, the other last thing Microsoft wants is to lose ground on any Web front: If people want access to adult content and they’re legally allowed it, then adult content they shall have.
Well and good. But in their attempt to have it both ways, Microsoft’s not doing either thing well. David K. points out that NightSurf is, ultimately, a service that pays its bills by referral and percentage: Sites to which they route surfers pay NightSurf a certain amount for each referral so that surfers going through MSN Search through NightSurf to, say, BearLovin.com can conceivably engender a profit for MSN, for NightSurf, and eventually for BearLovin if the surfers find something they like.
And if you don’t pay NightSurf to be listed, you don’t appear to play on NightSurf: Checking that site for “nightcharm” not only didn’t take me to David K.’s site but didn’t even guess which team the site’s rooting for, as they say. (Searching on the name of a Web site “for people who love naked men” should return neither the “Massive Mammories” [sic] site nor “Awesome Lesbian,” I’m thinking.)
Why NightSurf? According to Microsoft, “Our relationship with Night Surf [sic] (owned by WebPower) means that the user can get the results they are looking for without displaying them by default on the search results page.” Since that told us nothing, we turned to NightSurf, which claims to be “the Internet’s authoritative resource and directory to legal, non-obscene, mature-themed adult services” and states that all sites listed must adhere to 12 standard practices, culling out those that, among other things, do page-jacking (opening all those windows) or show “illegal obscenity, sometimes called hardcore pornography,” or don’t require proof of age.
These claims are provably untrue: Not only was I page-jacked, but from the first NightSurf page, I was exactly two clicks (and no age verification whatsoever) away from seriously hardcore images. If this is Microsoft’s idea of a reputable partner, I’m curious about whether anyone in Redmond has checked to be sure that NightSurf scans listed sites for the other things they claim. Among the standards listed: no spamming, no credit-card fraud, no child pornography.
ULTIMATELY, IT’S NOT about the material—as a good First Amendment absolutist, I’m not taking away your right to surf where you will. But with searches this awful and an “adult content service” that doesn’t appear to adhere to its own rules, one has to ask how serious Microsoft is about filtering material at all—and whether this is another good-idea-bad-execution in the long, sorry history of Net filtering.
According to the same MS PR person, “MSN Search is continuously updating terms which could bring a user to explicit material search results and putting the appropriate blocks as possible [e.g., the block page when the user types in something like XXX]. However, given the breadth of topics on the Internet, identifying all search terms that could be linked to adult oriented material with 100 percent accuracy is nearly impossible.” Nevertheless, even the most unimaginative MSN filtering drone could have come up with “naked girls” as a possibly problematic search.
Inspired, we thought hard (oh, not hard, that’s an awful pun) . . . we thought deeply (even worse!) . . . we THOUGHT and THOUGHT and came up with a list of what, at the moment, MSN does and doesn’t raise an eyebrow over. For your edification, and because some of us can’t believe we actually typed any of these on an office computer, we leave you with a list of What Microsoft Does and Doesn’t Think Might Return Adult Content.
Microsoft thinks you might be offended by results of the following searches: naked woman, naked ass, naked ladies, nude woman, nude women, nude pussy, blowjob, blow job, eat pussy, eating pussy, naked men, nude men, sex, sexx, sexxx, cum, ass, cunt, threesome, m鮡ge a trois, orgy, adult toys, anal, sucking, fingering, twink.
Microsoft has no problem with the following searches: naked girls, naked pussy, naked lady, nude girls, naked boys, naked boy, nude boy, bare woman, bare women, bare man, come, live girls, pussy girl, boy cock, man cock, girl ass, man ass, watersports, vibrator, rubber, latex, leather, daddies, fetish, xaviera, sucker, suck, blow, balling, bear, jerk, jerking, daddy bear, femme, butch-femme, pussy, dick, cock.
