Mark Neely <accessnt@ozemail.com.au> writes:

I was just testing out some new search software, and polled Alta Vista to see how it all worked. I used "sex" as my search term, and Alta Vista reported that their were "no documents matching - sex ignored"!

Interestingly enough it will let you search with other, sex-related terms (such as "nude", "f*ck" etc), but not sex!

Very bizarre indeed.

This seems to be true of any word that shows up more than a certain number of times. For example, I got the same results when searching for the words "the" and "and". On the other hand, combination searches (such as "sex discrimination") seem to work fine. You can also use the + operator to limit searches to pages with the word sex. Thus: censorship sex and censorship are exactly the same search (because sex is ignored), but censorship +sex searches for censorship (initially ignoring sex), and then turns up only pages which contain the word sex. Consequently "+sex" is actually a valid search to find pages which contain the word sex, but again such a search is not very likely to be useful. This isn't any kind of censorship attempt on the part of DEC, just a basic realization that when 8,883,803 web pages contain the word sex, it doesn't make sense for alta-vista to bother sorting them by date for you.