Search Stupidity

Google continues to degrade as a useful service. To go with its endless ads and poor relevance we can now add an increasing puritanical streak. I covered similar problems with its image search all the way back in 2012. Now its web search has taken a similar turn.

If you search for a dominatrix in a city – for example the query {la dominatrix} – the default results are a whole heap of junk. I get zero useful pro-domme sites. Instead I get a bunch of books being sold, a few random magazine articles and some obscure music track that has that title.  The top link for {NYC dominatrix} is a New York Post story about domme who tried to poison someone. The rest are random social media nonsense and more garbage stories from sites like The Daily Mail. All of this is with Safe Search off.

Weirdly, to get good results, you need to turn off personalized search. On my web browser that’s buried under “Google Settings->More Settings->Personal Results->Show Personal Results”. In other words, a setting that almost nobody is going to find or change. I say it’s weird, because a correctly personalized results for me should be all pro-domme links! My browser history is full of visits to domme sites, their social media accounts and similarly kinky sources. Yet Google is either stupid enough to miss that or puritanical enough to think I shouldn’t be going there.

Although changing that Google setting fixes the issue, it’s probably best to vote with your clicks and just avoid the site entirely. That change is going to cost a lot of dommes a lot of money, flushing their SEO investment down the drain. The good news is that (so far) similar queries to Bing give me excellent results, no faffing about with settings needed. That’s already my go to search for my PC. I might have to update my other devices now.

Here’s one of the LA dommes whose site is normally in the top 10 results but is entirely absent with the default settings -the fabulous Inga Larsson.