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[Sheryl Dwinell]

At 12:57 PM 10/8/97 -0700, you wrote:
>This query was sent to me.  Does anyone have a solution?  I too find it
>annoying when I do a search in a search engine like Yahoo for "sex
>education" and get hit in the face with animated gifs of people having sex.
>

I couldn't resist trying this out in Yahoo and I got a banner ad for a
Women's Wire relationship-advice site (totally non-pornographic imagery), a
Ben & Jerry's lifetime of ice cream sweepstakes, Download Microsoft
FrontPage 98, an ad for SportSite Direct (selling sporting goods), Free
issue of the Red Herring (again, non-porn). No banners of people having
sex. I recall reading something about how Yahoo doesn't except such
banners, so I think the folks at Yahoo wouldn't exactly be thrilled to hear
that they serve up banners with gifs of people having sex.  If you have a
specific engine where this happened, just state the name of the engine. 

I'm in the middle of preparing for a class on how to use search engines, so
I attempted this search in Excite, Infoseek, Webcrawler, Hotbot and Alta
Vista. One of the sample searches I had for our class was to find
information related to sexually explicit web sites in the public library
(an example of searching for a 'hot topic'). In doing my searching, I
hadn't ever run into a sexually explicit banner of any type. So, I searched
for "sex education", and "sex" by itself, approx. 20 times in each engine
over the course of a couple hours, yesterday afternoon and this morning.
Excite & Hotbot were the only ones that had porn-related banners, and only
Excite had anything close to what I'd call 'explicit' although no nasty
parts were exposed and there was no simulated sex. If you query Excite &
Hotbot, they may have a policy about how racy the banners can be.
  
Suggestions: write to the offending search engine(s) and make your voice
heard and/or avoid the search engines that serve up banners that offend
you.  In the extreme, if you having filtering software in your library and
can select sites to block, I guess you could always block out hotbot and
Excite.

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu