From: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 22:40:08 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: An interesting tid-bit
In-Reply-To: <3.0b36.32.19961126133618.006d8e9c@ozemail.com.au>
Message-ID: <199611260640.BAA29851@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Mark Neely <accessnt@ozemail.com.au> writes:

> 
> I was just testing out some new search software, and polled Alta Vista to
> see how it all worked. I used "sex" as my search term, and Alta Vista
> reported that their were "no documents matching - sex ignored"!
> 
> Interestingly enough it will let you search with other, sex-related terms
> (such as "nude", "f*ck" etc), but not sex!
> 
> Very bizarre indeed.

This seems to be true of any word that shows up more than a certain
number of times.  For example, I got the same results when searching
for the words "the" and "and".  On the other hand, combination
searches (such as "sex discrimination") seem to work fine.  You can
also use the + operator to limit searches to pages with the word sex.
Thus:

   censorship sex

and

   censorship

are exactly the same search (because sex is ignored), but

   censorship +sex

searches for censorship (initially ignoring sex),
and then turns up only pages which contain the word sex.  Consequently
"+sex" is actually a valid search to find pages which contain the word
sex, but again such a search is not very likely to be useful.

This isn't any kind of censorship attempt on the part of DEC, just a
basic realization that when 8,883,803 web pages contain the word sex,
it doesn't make sense for alta-vista to bother sorting them by date
for you.