Miserable Failure wants to know what queries you are making
As most of the blogosphere knows, Googling Miserable Failure and choosing “I’m feeling Lucky” yields George Bush’s White House site as a result. Now the feds are demanding that Google and 3 other search engines (Yahoo, AOL, MSN) turn over all search queries made by users as well as a list of all of the URLs indexed by the search engines. While Google is so far resisting the subpoena of their logs, the sorry corporate bitches at Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft have caved and given the feds what they want.
Although nobody is really talking, it appears that the point of this data collection is to evaluate the effectiveness of filters in screening out pornography by determining how often search engine users encounter pornographic websites. Ultimately the dipsticks at Justice are attempting to show that filtering is an inadequate technological alternative to criminal law aimed at preventing minors from being exposed to online porn. The Child Online Protection Act makes it a crime for a commercial Web site to post material that some jurors might find “harmful” if a minor stumbled across it. Actually, I rather assume that someone who types in a querie like “sluts fucking cum movies” is probably beyond finding something that is going to do them harm.
Come to think of it, as a pubescent boy, I had no problem creating my own pornography. Match raging hormones with the lingerie section of my Mother’s Sears catalog and I entertained myself in ways that would cause the average Karismatic Kristian to speak in tongues for 40 days and 40 nights.
I’m concerned about an Administration that loves to go through mountains of data looking for dirt getting its hands on even raw queries without IP addresses attached. There is nothing at all to prevent them using this data to look at what American’s are curious about. With the American Taliban in charge, who knows what new laws and new crimes could spring from their fundamentalist minds. Its not just a matter of personal privacy. We have an administration that gets instant hard-ons about interfering with personal decisions on birth control, reading materials, advance directives, and coping with terminal diseases. Can’t you just see the horrified looks on the faces of Dobson, Robertson, Falwell, & Kennedy when their Justice Deparment lapdogs share with them the demented queries we Americans are submitting to online search engines?
Google this: Asshole “I’m feeling lucky”.
Once again, Google shows themselves to be head and shoulders above the rest of these corporations. Now if only their interview process didn’t have more than 30 rounds…