Google today made a noticeable blunder after their SafeSearch filter reclassified Kotaku as a softcore pornography site. The error was believed to have occurred during Kotaku’s regular slot dedicated to “Kotaku East”, when the site posts about Japanese boobs culture. The automatic image scanner picked up what it classified as “softcore pornography” with no less than 18 counts, and immediately redirected the site’s search classification to be invisible unless safe-search was turned off.
“You’re damn right I’m angry!” said Brian Ashcraft when I asked him if he was angry. “I put a lot of work into reporting on Japanese boobs culture every day, and to have Google mess up this bad is just embarrassing for them. Not me. I’m not embarrassed. Why would I be embarrassed? Just because a machine called my work porn doesn’t mean I’m undermined as a journalist. I’m not! Stop looking at me like that!”
Google has since managed to fix the mistake and apologised to Kotaku publically. “We’re really sorry our robots thought your site was porn. They’re an automated program that responds to images and keywords and unfortunately Kotaku fell into our very specific and carefully chosen parameters. We had no idea that game journalism could straddle that line between news and porn so delicately, as we assumed a gaming blog would post about games and not Japanese boobs culture.” The temporary mess up also lead to Kotaku being flooded with adverts for various porn sites, including Redtube, Xtube and Jezebel. The Jezebel adverts have yet to be removed.
Now THIS is quality journalism. Keep it up.