Hop to YouTube India, type Indian in the search box and the search suggest has following suggestions for you:
Oh well, YouTube’s community guidelines states that YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content.
And YouTube suggests ‘sexscandals, sextape, sexual intercourse live” in the search suggest!
Sweet!.
Many years back I heard one company saying “Do not be evil”.
Not sure what’s the name of the company? Can you recall?
WTF it is, shit man, it will seriouly affect many young school and college aspirants which also affects their parents dream of thier son.
No! I too can’t recall the name of the company but I remember they made a lot of fuss about that evilish tag line.
I guess it was some search company, wasn’t it?
As far as I remember, there was no such company that said ‘do not be evil’…
Sunil – you must have been mistaken!
well its nice to tell “no evil” at the startup stage, but once stocks,money & big corporates comes the angel itself don’t know when its turns into evil..
You missed the syntax Ashish. It was “Don’t be evil” *until you are in a position that you change the definition of evil*
How is sex and being evil related?
Well, sex and evil are not related – but its evil to show sexual content for a query like ‘indian’. – what really pissed me off is that these are attempts to drive people to see these contents (and increase the # of views, which can be monetized later).
I am wondering where the fuck is indian media which is dumb enough to call youtube a community service etc..
speaks to double standards of a co.
Oh my god…..these ‘don’t be evil’ guys are destroying our culture by asking our kids to look out for pornography and that too with the help of a cleverly designed algorithm.
It seems that algorithm is so smart that it does not produce any sexual suggestions when you type “American”,”British” or even “German”, but produces the same when you search for “Indian” ,”Pakistani” or “Lankan”.
But then, I completely agree that it is not that smart to comprehensibly tell us that it is just an algorithm and only a reflection of our sexually repressed society!!
It’s not abt algo – as far as I can tell you, majority of web search queries are adult in nature. But that won’t be shown in ‘top queries of 2007′ etc – since those are editorially removed from the logs.
Imagine a student searching for something that starts with ‘Indian’..where will he land? [sextapes or sexscandals'?]
Its a real shame!
Look, the algorithm is just a program. It has no agenda of its own and it certainly is not trying to do something evil. It is just a program.
My guess is that the algo just shows the commonly searched queries on top (“popular queries”), and that most indian people search for “indian sextapes” and “indian sexual intercourse live” and not “indian education” on the website, and the algo is just reflecting that.
As you can see, it is you people that are corrput, not youtube.
Your comment reminded me of an ad where dhoni says “start questioning (and lets not accept what’er is given to you’
“it is you people that are corrput, not youtube.” – and why have you excluded yourself from the group?
If algo shows commonly searched queries, even Google trends’ top queries will start showing the same. !
-Start Questioning things which are not acceptable (instead of pointing fingers).
Pradeep is right. It suggests you top searches. Once youtube product guys realize that top searches are ‘sex related” they may put some filter. Lets see.
Buddy! Isn’t a portal more important than the algorithm?
If Google just shows algorithm, they will not show ‘indian railways’ as the topmost query from India (it has to be something adult/sexual in nature).
Please understand that a portal like this is used by tons of people who are not tech savvy [who dpn't even know what search suggest is and will think these are the only query he/she can use]
A clear representation of the much perverted indian online crowd, since the suggestions are derived out of previously searched keywords, and in order of popularity.
You can’t say a site is bad just ’cause of this, its a hiccup they probably never expected would happen, and they will fix it as soon as you notice them, so did you or are you just gonna fume here about it?
And about your student point, its them in the first place why this suggestion is at the tops there.
Sex sells. India is a sex starved society (Yes it is even though we are the second most populous nation, most of the people don’t get to experience free access to a member of opposite sex until they get married). YouTube’s search suggestions reflect what people are searching for the most. And in India it is sex. Check out Alexa rankings, ever heard of masalaboarad, xboard.us, debonairblog.com? They rank in top 100 Indian sites, what do they contain? Sex! Indians think YouTube is for sharing sex related videos. It not the suggestion algorithm, its the people who are responsible for the suggestions. But Google can definitely do with some form of filtering.
It’s rather fashionable to go after a giant because we know it wont bother sniping back at us. I find it kiddish that some people actually think that Google would prop up ‘sex’ on a search for the term ‘Indian’ to get more dollars. It is a clear case of the algorithm throwing up what most people look for. If anything, it is a demonstration of the algorithm and the search engine’s integrity that they let the content remain independent.
Brilliantly picked up on! While my patriotism has left me slightly outraged, I cannot help but seeing the funny side to this. To be honest, I’m not that surprised either – have you looked at the most popular videos lately on BigAdda.com? Sure, I do agree with all of you all that believe that there needs to be some sort of filtering mechanism. I wouldn’t be so hasty in damning Google for being a profit hungry beast that has let this one slip in a desire to make more money. I’m not entirely sure whether this was done on purpose or simply one that fell through the cracks.
As far as the company tag line (I call this a tag line on purpose) of ‘Don’t be evil’, there has been much debate over what they define as ‘evil’. When asked what ‘evil’ was, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google famously replied, that ‘evil’ was whatever Sergey Brin said it was. Another famous example of Google’s inconsistency with their tag line was the fact that while it refused to sell guns on its online shopping portal ‘Froogle’, it did sell ammunition.
Gautam Kshatriya
gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
http://www.moneyvidya.com/blog
Well..this problem no longer appears now. It just might have been an oversight on part of Google.
Yep! The search suggest query has been rectified.
A company/product of Google/YouTube size cannot afford to have an oversight!
And am glad that you do get ‘non-adult’ suggestions for the query ‘Indian’.
The post was not meant to demean any product (I am stuck onto youtube), but the idea was to make Google/YouTube guys aware of what they are doing!
And all in good spirit!
[and yeah, we did receive a good number of hits from Google IPs - so am sure we and all the commentors played a good role in solving this.]
-Ashish.
Ashish, good show. But, can you now put an update on your main post that it got rectified and not try to increase your blog’s pageviews?
Sensationalism at its best! You could give India TV and the like run for their money 
“You could give India TV and the like run for their money”
Thanks for your responsible comment!
-Ashish
Neeraj:
There should be an update just because this concerns the mighty Google? PluggdIn is about “Reporting” news. It’s not about making suggestions and then posting “Thank you” updates after the big companies have taken notice.
Infact, if Google has corrected this after reading it on PluggdIn, they should openly acknowledge it and thank Ashish and PluggdIn. And that is what I would call – “Not being Evil”.
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Hahaha …. This is Indian libido at its highest. Look at most viewed videos on Big Adda. Same story. Most video publishing sites in India have pornography as the highest viewed content. So much for sex education in schools.
Anyway a great idea for a startup – a porn site …. no rocket science and sure shot hits. i am sure most money ppl will be happy to fund it.