If somebody were to monitor my searches, they might think I was an extreme right-wing, communist, racist, radical, or a pervert. I’m not any of that, I’m just doing Investigative Internet Research (IIR).
Search engines have filtering to save you from pornography and extreme views of many kinds. I have no idea who sets the standards for what you can see and what you can’t. I have no idea what they block and what they don’t. I have no idea what they index and what they don’t. I don’t care what they let me see and what they don’t, because I can’t change it. I just do IIR.
A friend of mine was looking for Pig Candy, which is candied bacon — who knew such a thing existed. On his first try using DDG, the following site was blocked: http://www.nakedwhiz.com/pigcandy.htm . This might be termed food-porn, but it doesn’t seem subversive or perverted.
If you look at the page, you will notice the word “naked”. This innocuous word probably filtered-out this page when the default filtering was in place. However, Bing’s default “moderate” filtering allows the page to appear in the results.
Filtering, indexing bias, and censorship are constant problems for the Investigative Internet Researcher. I have a standard set of searches that let me know what will likely be filtered out of my results on that day. Sometimes, in some search engines, setting the filtering to off will not show any improvement in the results. This tells me they don’t index those terms or always filter or censor those terms. The maddening part of all this is that the breadth of the filtering is liable to change from time-to-time — that is why I might appear to be a extreme right-wing, communist, racist, radical, pervert so often.
If you work in an environment where your online activity is monitored — don’t become the company’s extreme right-wing, communist, racist, radical, pervert — search through an encrypted VPN connection.