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Comment by et-al | Hacker News Reader

Could it be due to some overly zealous prude filter and the unfortunate coincidence that "beej" is American slang for blowjob (oral sex)?

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I've definitely considered that. (I'm well-aware of my nickname's connotations, and I just don't care. :) )

But they index everything else on my site and don't prude out over that...

Actually outright porn is indexed you know or so I hear.

Porn is one thing, the word Beej is quite another. I wish this was a joke.

Indexed, but only returned if the search query was explicitly and unambiguously about porn.

Not true, I've had pages of x-rated results with SafeSearch on, with DDG and Bing, a couple of times. The search only needs to be sufficiently weird.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334670

Where "weird" involves words like "licking" and "party" (not saying it's not a bug, just that it's a statistics vs actual language understanding bug in a feature and not absence of that feature). I bet there's no way to compose all of the words "spatula", "serotonin", "pion" and "deconstruction" along with words like is/a/an/of/how/what/when that would turn safe search off, despite any query of this format would pretty weird.

That's pretty obscure slang, I'm American and have never heard it.

It's very common.

Is it very common?

If I search "Beej" on Google without Safesearch enabled, I get 14.3M results, if I turn on the Safesearch filter, it still returns 14.3M results.

If I repeat the same experiment with "blowjob", it's 1.5B results vs 23M.

If I search for "Beej" on Bing with SafeSearch Off, I get 2,840,000 results, while with Safesearch on Strict, I get 2,800,000 results. I couldn't search for "blowjob" at all with Safesearch on Strict.

It's generally spoken, not typed out.

I used to say, "'Beej', like 'B.J. Hunnicutt' from MASH."

But MASH is getting a little too far removed these days. :)

Took me a while to figure it out, but yeah - seems "Beej" is pronounced as "(Bee)(j)", which matches the pronunciation of "BJ". But I don't think it's relevant to site indexing, unless search engines started to take homophones into account.

EDIT: but maybe they did, ever since voice assistants became a thing?

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