As you may or may not have ready Google is discriminating against the LGBT community with Google Instant. Google Instant will not return results for the words Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transexual. There has been some mis-interpretation and saying gay will return results but this is false. When you type gay it assumes you are typing Gaylord and returns results for that.
I am personally offended by this and am seriously considering stopping my use of Google services as a result. At the very least I will not use Google Instant. I guess it is time for a new search provider to come along and replace Google.
If you want to join me in contacting Google about this, their contact information is below.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
650 253 0000
October 4th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
actually, they’re not being discriminatory. well, not anymore than they were previously with the previous google suggestions in first place. the reason behind this block is to filter porn, as google’s default search setting is “moderate” which filters explicit images but not regular search terms.
and while ‘gay’ itself doesn’t return results, if you type ‘gay (space)’ google instant does give relevant search results/suggestions. variations of ‘transsexual’ too do show results, its mostly the ones which return a high amount of adult content that are removed from google instant.
October 4th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Hi AJ,
Actually, Google has changed since Google Instant was released and there was a big uproar about this issue. At first, when Google Instant was initially released they would not return results for just the word gay. When you typed gay (space) to convince Google you just wanted the word gay it would return a blank screen. Same went for Lesbian, Bisexual, etc.
I just did a quick test and for at least the first 5 pages of results the word gay does not return any adult content. Google has fixed this problem, but in my opinion it should not have happened in the first place.