No "Gay" or "Sex" In Yahoo! Clues: The Emergent Trend of Filtered Results
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Looking for Gay or Sex-related search results in Yahoo! Clues? Forget about it.
Update: A representative from Yahoo! has responded to this article and further questions. Responses are at page bottom.
I asked, and now I’m telling: looks like Yahoo! Clues, the new keyword search and comparison tool, has a problem with the gays.
Yahoo!’s new research tool Clues appears to be part of the growing trend of search giants and their tools not reporting results or returning data on sex-related keywords. Launched this last Tuesday, the service offered a way for people to “Explore interesting patterns in what people are searching for on Yahoo! Search.” As of this writing, amazingly, there is still no data available for anyone searching for “gay,” “masturbation” or “sex“. No data available, indeed.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. It’s just like if Google Trends had a homophobic little brother. Especially when Clues does give us results for “lesbian,” “bisexual” and “transgender.”
Yahoo! Clues and its glaring omissions of certain sexual topics is a new salvo in the growing trend of search services non-transparently serving their users with G-rated results. Google Instant took the prize for showing extreme intolerance around not only adult-related keywords, but for refusing to include certain people (disclosure: I am one of the people Google Instant disallows). But unlike Clues, Instant does allow the word “sex.”
Maybe part of the problem with Clues is that there is also no data available for “dominatrix.”
Yahoo! Clues is supposed to be for keyword research and comparison. People are strange, and having access to keyword search data helps to understand what words are being used to find web content (or not find it). Plugging words into Google Trends always yields a few surprises.
Yet Clues wants to go a bit further on the first date, and it’s entertaining enough, so we hung out for a little longer than our distaste for uncomfortably filtered results usually allows. And some of the extras are really neat. After keyword comparison, Clues provides demographics with ability to sort by age and/or gender. Searching by sex seems ironic when looking at results for “transgender” but, hey, our “no gays” Clues has already made it clear he isn’t the kind of guy to buy you flowers on the first date.
As you’d expect from a good ‘ol boy, Clues is America-centric. ” Currently, only Yahoo! Search information originating from the United States is available.” Clues’ income data is calculated “using anonymous aggregated zip code information from Yahoo! Search matched against per capita income data from the US Census Bureau.” I had hoped for more to substantiate the data, but it still looks neat — plus, the “search flow” data is super-fun to play with, where you can see what terms were put in just before and after the term you’re investigating.
If Trends offered up this data, and did so globally, it would be unstoppable. Clues comes out of the box with handicaps so severe, I can tell you already that there isn’t going to be a second date. Fun to play with, yes. But I would never, ever use Clues for making any business decisions whatsoever, nor for article research.
Mistress is displeased with Clues
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Methinks its time to boycott Yahoo officially.
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I understand the sentiment but i doubt that it will make much of an impact on yahoo.
