[WEB4LIB] Google, Pikachu, porn, etc.

[Tom Zimoski]

It's not that unusual for a search engine to return on the first page of
results some unexpected sexual material.  It hardly seems to matter what
one was searching for.  I remember using alltheweb for a search, getting
this unexpected sexual material, and then appending -sex to my original
search. The results were much better on that particular search.  I
understand that I might have eliminated some useful sites.  

It was that experience that led me to experiment with pikachu and porn as
search terms. I'm still looking for help in understanding the result
describe below.

Tom Zimoski/Fresno County Library

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Roy Tennant wrote:

> Pikachu porn? What on earth can you be thinking? No, come to think of 
> it, I don't even want to go there! <grin>
> Roy
> 
> >I've sent essentially this same message to Google and may one day receive
> >a reply but I am not optimistic.
> >
> >While preparing for a beginning internet class we will be offering to the
> >public I was playing around and came up with these results from Google:
> >
> >pikachu        about 206,000 hits
> >pikachu -porn  about 134,000 hits
> >pikachu porn   about     943 hits  (including www.pokemon.com)
> >
> >It seems to me that the last two should add up to the first. I know each
> >number is preceded by "about" but really! There may be something
> >basic about using Google that I fail to grasp.  Can you help?
> >