Yahoo.it censored for 'preteen' ?

[scangilli]

Hi everybody,

here we go with a new weird thing I just found out about Yahoo!. Still about the keyword 'preteen'.

In short, if you go to Yahoo.com and search for 'preteen', you'll have about 4,450,000 results. Nothing strange yet. But if you do the same search on the local Yahoo.it, the results you'll get will be equal to zero!!

Also, there's more: once you see the zero results page, look at the top of the page, and you'll see you're not any longer in the "Web" section, but instead you're in the "Directory", and even though you click on the Web link, there's no way to find a way out of there. I've attached a couple of images.

I've already posted a couple of screenshot on my blog:
http://www.marketingroutes.com/2006/05/09/yahooit-e-yahoocom-2-pesi-2-misure/

Does any of you have an explanation for that? I tried on other local yahoo! domins, but til now the only one showing no results is the italian domain.

[scangilli]

One more thing, a few guys over at another search engine forum just discovered that there is a sort of case sensitive filter that's active on that keyword, cause if you search for 'Pret...' you get results....

Any takers of what the hell is going on?

[dannysullivan]

Yeah, that's very strange -- and just the exact word preteen, not reteen or pretee. My guess is that Yahoo got some complaint, perhaps a legal one, about child porn sites in its results in Italy. Rather than filter them out, which is hard, they may have hard coded all results to kick into the directory.

[FeldBum]

Yahoo.com image search doesn't find any results for preteen, with or without safesearch on.

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=preteen&fr=&ei=UTF-8

Google has 15,300 results. MSN has 3,160, but seems to filter even with SafeSearch off.

Slippery slope here...

[scangilli]

My guess is that Yahoo got some complaint, perhaps a legal one, about child porn sites in its results in Italy

This would probably explain, at least in part, why if you search for the same keyword using capital letters, you don't see any filter on.
Seems like they were in a hurry or something and chose the quickest solution.
However, hope a voice will raise from Yahoo! on this matter :confused:

[Seth Finkelstein]

It's case-sensitive generally, any uppercase letter will bypass the ban.

I suspect it's a bug with something like a SafeSearch wordlist

Yahoo Italy Keyword Search Problem - Censorship Or Bug?
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001010.html