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Ask HN: Subtracting off unwanted porn results is not allowed anywhere – why?

3 points by banmeagaindan2 ↗ HN
Has anybody else noticed you cannot use the subtraction operator on any porn sites?

This strikes me as needing explanation. It is like a world for which every choice exists - except the choice to opt out.

There are people who want all the porn - there are people who want no porn - but between a bigger group has some fetishes and are disgusted by others. Why then does the standard negation operator not work on any mainstream porn channel?

I could make some guesses - but you have to admit this is a deliberate choice by the porn search engines - I know everybody on HN knows this is not a technical issue - so I'm asking if this is a known business decision or a known social intervention.

2 comments

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geoah
Could it have more to do with user experience than business or social reasons? ie people meaning to use dashes instead of the boolean operator and instead by mistake removing results from their searches?
banmeagaindan2
It looks like policy is to strip most of what's outside the alphabet unless it falls into known permitted keyword matches - and I expect X-Y would always match X Y.

Doesn't explain why users cannot request no results in some categories they are turned off by. Most search engines offer that option in some way - except the porn versions. It's more strange the more I think about it.