MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?
Acer Plans A 16 lb. Notebook
— from Slashdot
Well not exactly gigantic but at 16 pounds and sporting a 17-inch screen this thing is stretching the term portable. It also features a 3EGHz Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, a 7200rpm 160gb hard disk, DVD-burner and the kitchen sink. ZDNet has a rundown of all of this beast’s features.” This sounds like a joke (or a typo), but the story says otherwise.
MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?
Thomas Shaddack spotted this on http://www.root.cz/ (in Czech) — if you go to MSN Search and search for ‘XFree86’, it tells you that you’ve ‘entered a search term that is likely to return adult content’, and directs you to the porn search engine NightSurf.com, which lists a bunch of porn sites that ostensibly match the term ‘XFree86’. If you search for ‘XFree86’ on Google, however, it’s clear that the top matching terms returned by a normal search, are XFree86 sites, are not a bunch of porn sites. MSN is apparently blocking the specific term ‘XFree86’ and not just filtering on something stupid like the ‘X’ or the ‘Free’, since you can search for ‘XFree85’ and ‘XFree87’ with no problem. And search terms like ‘Linux’, ‘AOL’ and ‘Macintosh’ are allowed, so at least MSN hasn’t simply blacklisted all competitors’ keywords as ‘porn’, but why would they be blocking ‘XFree86’?”