Good News, Lesbians — Google Instant May Soon Suggest You!

As you know, Google won’t show certain search results in Google Instant for search results that seem pornographic, violent or hateful. The includes the word “lesbian,” even though few would consider it to be pornographic on its own.

I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google said they will try to fix lesbian so that search results show up in Google Instant as you type that into the search box:

Kelly from Google said this in a thread, lesbian not showing search results as you type in Google Instant “is a bug and we are working to see if we can fix it,” Google said.

But really, can Google fix it? I am not too sure. If you look at the results for a search on [lesbians], you will find 3 of the first 5 results all link to pornographic sites.

Even though the term “lesbians” is not pornographic by definition, the search results, at least 60% of the first five search results are. I don’t see how Google would show pornographic search results in Google Instant without manually changing the search results or at least changing the ranking algorithm in Google Instant not to show any pornographic web sites when using Google Instant.

I should note that searching for [lesbian] in singular tense does not show pornographic web sites in the top search results. Only the plural tense shows these sites.

For more on the topic of Google Instant and its filtering of certain words, see our detailed story, The Five Words You Can Never Suggest On Google Instant.