like any other vain (and/or bored) sod i occasionally put my own name into search engines – this evening i’ve just encountered some curious peculiarities when searching “everyone’s uploads” on flickr and using my name as a search term – namely: it invariably results in the following message
“trevorbrown” as one word is okay but anything like “trevor-brown” or “trevor_brown” or “trevor/brown” etc is apparently forbidden (?) and results in the hiccups message, no matter how many times you retry it
also you are able to search “trevor brown book” or “trevor brown anything” – except you are unable to search “trevor brown art” or “trevor brown baby art” – which does seem a bit suspect, no?
i’ve tried to find other blacklisted search terms without success, i can’t replicate the hiccups message with anything else besides my name – you can search child porn or whatever you like to your heart’s content – just too bad if you want to search “trevor brown” (ha, i bet all the other trevor browns in the world really hate me!)
my experiments have been limited to safari and firefox browsers on a mac
Most odd. 1,895 items are listed for a Marquis de Sade search. Yep, looks like they’re “brown-listed” you!
thats so strange…I just tried it. I looked up photographers with the same “taboo” subject and they come up fine.
same thin happens on Opera/IE/Ffox on vista
so it’s certainly not limited to browsing capabilities
Strangely a search for “trevor brown artwork” works, albeit with very limited results
i wonder, then, what would happen if you tried to get an account of your own and tag your name. i’m getting the same hiccups message as well, but then i’m also using firefox on a mac.
so it’s confirmed, it’s not just me, i’m not dreaming this! – i’ve just posted my findings on the flickr help forum – let’s see how far that gets me…
Trevor vs. The Internet, Chapter XVI!!
it’s like Robin Hood or Pancho Villa, with naked little girls.
the (ahem!) “bug” has now been fixed by flickr
I just searched on flickr for “Trevor Brown” on a proxy server from Europe and it works just fine. (Don’t know if you access this page : http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=trevor+brown
I’ll send you a screenshot of it by email if you can’t open the page.
yeah, they fixed it – they wouldn’t say what the problem was besides an over-insistence that they never blacklist search-terms – they seem very touchy on that subject