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MSN filtering adult content?

When did this start, or has it always been there?

         

werty

7:42 pm on Sep 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I have been searching for adult terms on MSN and it has been returning all non adult results.

Also if you do a certain adult search MSN sends you over to another site saying that you can search for that type of content there.

I have never had to deal with Adult stuff before and I am wondering if this filter is new or if it has always been there?

Searched WW and had no luck, any info on it would be great.

Thank you in advance.

steveb

9:20 pm on Sep 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Wow, just when you think the search engines can't do something any lamer, here we go.

Interesting also that wherever that other site gets its results from, they are horrible, as official type sites rank that rank first in Yahoo (and Google) are nowhere.

If msn search is going to not have a complete database, it will trivialize itself pretty fast.

herb

9:49 pm on Sep 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have been searching for adult terms on MSN and it has been returning all non adult results.

I don't know the terms you were searching on, but is the same thing happening on Yahoo who is supplying the MSN results. Or, is this only a MS tuned function

ALbino

11:38 pm on Sep 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I've noticed this before too. I think it's only an MSN thing. If you search for "Playboy" www.playboy.com isn't even listed in the first 50 results on MSN, but it's #1 on Yahoo. The results almost look like the Yahoo results if you change your SafeSearch filter to Strict instead of Moderate. Is there a way to change the SafeSearch filtering in MSN like you can in Yahoo and Google?

rfgdxm1

3:10 am on Oct 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Confirmed here about the "playboy" search on msn.com. The magazine's site is #1 on yahoo.com, where I have preferences set to "moderate" (the default, I presume). I just can't find how to change the preferences on msn.com. Anyone have the appropriate e-mail addy I can shoot off a memo to MSN about this problem?

MSN is clearly limiting this just to sexually oriented searches. I ran a few test searches where I would expect well known recreational drug sites to come up on top. They did. Thus MSN seems to be limiting its net nanny approach.

skipfactor

3:36 am on Oct 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I think it's a brilliant marketing move if differentiation is the intent. Additionally, it's due diligence if you're bundling default address bar search on Kindergarten PCs and you plan on replacing "Start" with "Search" in the near future.

If this is what's going on it almost seems to be a banned words list, though variations of the terms for male chickens and those birds that live in the Galapagos slip the filter.

airpal

4:27 pm on Oct 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



MSN has had a contract with NightSurf for a few years now. Since nightsurf is simply a farm of affiliate links for its parent company, I hope (and think) their contract ends soon.

Spine

11:39 pm on Oct 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Meanwhile, MSNbot (and Slurp) only seem to grab my robots.txt and my index page from my adult info site.

Neither seems to want to crawl my pages, even though there is clean HTML, sitemap linked from the index page etc.

Simulated spiders don't have a problem, and Googlebot likes me too, so I have wondered what's going on.