That is scary stuff
The title is part of a Tweet sent to me yesterday when I passed on a news article. The relationship between the days search terms and the news article in question will become obvious as we move through this article. Here is a selection of the search terms for the day.
Search Terms
There were a couple that worried me, the first being, “would you be a sex slave“. I do hope they found the right articles: I see they found Would you prefer to be a Rinehart or a sex slave? but it doesn’t look like they found Illegal Immigration & Sexual Servitude. Pity, they may have learnt something.
To answer the question, no. Did you really think I would?
The “terrifying fictional nanny” bothered me a bit. Did they think I was terrifying? Our opposition party has recently been talking of subsiding nannies, but I think they were reading The Nanny State does not suit sick people. Yes, I agree, the nanny state can be a bit terrifying, but hardly fictional.
“submit intimate messages for partnership visa“? Yes, the answer is here, but they didn’t find it – that article would be Salacious Text Messages.
Right under that is a search term that saddened me: “tired of wife visa“. I can only guess, but I believe the searcher is tired of waiting for his wife’s visa. Whether it is a partner visa I don’t know, but I think it probably is, based on similar search terms that lead people to this site. I hope he found something to encourage him to hang in there. We know how bad it was for us and I cannot imagine waiting as some have to for over three years (including an appeal). The stress would be horrendous.
Seventh from the bottom – and I am NOT typing it here to be indexed by the search engines – is the search term that really bothered me. How on earth did that find us? An on-line friend, Raincoaster, is researching a topic for her work closely aligned to that search term and I realise it is no wonder she is having trouble sleeping. A few days ago I read an article in The Age about the dark web. Quite disturbing really. I knew of the existence, of course, but had never really sat and contemplated the extensiveness.
Within this web, drugs and guns are bought and sold, hitmen advertise their services, hackers can be hired to attack an enemy’s computer and pornographic images to satisfy the most depraved tastes can be downloaded.
Where, I wonder, is our world really going….
Perhaps we could concentrate on cleaning up this dangerous aspect of our world and worry less about a few boat people. I wonder if either of our Australian political leaders even know the dark web exists. No votes in it, I suppose. Raincoaster estimates the dark web is at least 25% of the web, but qualifies her estimate as off-the-cuff. I would not be at all surprised if it were more. There is money to be made, after all.
The Tweet I used as the title read in full “ that is scary stuff ,the truth really is stranger than fiction.”
Yes, so often it is. Sadly.
Really strange actually…
Life is strange, sometimes.
It’s pretty scary – (a) what certain people search for – but also (b) the fact that those strings find blogs with no related content. I expect it’s to do with the curious way search algorithms work, but even so. Scary.
Puts me in mind of a curious point. It’s often said, I believe, that nobody predicted the internet – that our past view of ‘the future’ (as in, now) involved flying cars, food pills, mega-cities, monorails, moon shuttles and Trek transporters. Nobody predicted the internet.
Actually, somebody did – Arthur C. Clarke. As early as the 1960s he suggested that maybe we’d not have all those mega-engineering achievements. Maybe we’d have the advent of cheap, ubiquitous worldwide communication by which anybody could get in touch with anybody – including people they didn’t know previously. He predicted,in fact, the whole of the social consequence and mechanism of the internet. Including the salacious stuff, I might add – he wrote a very funny short story in 1963 basically telling the world that as soon as they got cheap, ubiquitous communications, it would get subverted for what we should best call the ‘dark side’.
Nobody else thought of it. Nobody. Clarke was a genius.
Must go, I suddenly have to check the incoming search strings on my own blog. Worried now.
Wow, Matthew, I never knew that about Clarke. Certainly a great vision into the future.
I remember reading an interview with the inventor of the internet – and he was worried back then.
I don’t like the idea of it supporting illegal and terrorist and other bad behaviours and occupations. Someone MUST be able to do something about it – of is it too useful tot he governments themselves?
That is scary stuff. Absolutely disgusting, actually. I don’t know how Raincoaster can stand researching it. Then, she’s pretty scary, herself, but in a good way.
Given the size of it globally, I consider it is a major problem that no-one is noticing. It may be my grandchildren that pay the full price.
Global anarchy, here we come.
The seventh one from the bottom is a worrying one, who the hell is searching these things? I get random things that link to my blog for some strange reason, I’ve ended up turning off my search engine indexing
You don’t want search traffic?
I agree though, it is disturbing, isn’t it? We know who are searching, the AFP and other law enforcement agencies work hard to break the rings and here’s hoping they break some more! Yuck.
I don’t know if search traffic is actually doing me any good, sure it gets me a high amount of views a day but they’re just numbers, is anyone actually reading and following my blog on the back of search traffic? I don’t know =/
I suppose in my case it is different – people are searching for what I write about in relation to partner visas. I do get comments, but more often contact emails, from people who find us through Google or other search engines. Given a lot of this site is written to help others in similar situations, I can’t really turn off the search engines.
I used to type out those kinds of lists, till I realized it only increased my ranking in searches for those terms. Smart of you to make it a jpg.
The last thing I wanted was any more of that particular type. The Qatar one is bad enough (every day) but not much I can do. I posted about it AFTER all the search terms, so my article about the search terms made no difference!
Scary stuff indeed..
I worry about the future, Helen. The net is very young in relative terms, and look what it has managed to do already.
I know.. it is both brilliant and terrifying in equal measure
I like that description, Helen. Very astute!
Robyn I have always believed that the availability of violent horror, sexual films and books contributes to the increased violence in society, how can it not? and the dark web has the same effect, scary indeed.
I agree with you Gilly. The fact that the dark web supports and facilitates criminal activity (and worse) is the worrying bit. I hear our governments talk about censoring the “normal” people – yet so far I have heard nothing about the governments taking any action over the dark web. Is it inactionable?
One really has to be careful about the terms used on line because certain terms trigger attention and thereby create an association, most often unwanted.
I know Paul, which is precisely why I didn’t retype the search term I disliked intensely. However, if we don’t speak up we continue to allow the baddies to exist and grow. It is a bit of a catch-22 – don’t mention anything to avoid association but thereby tacitly allow continuance, or speak up and risk the negative association. I don’t have an answer, I can only be true to my feelings.
ITs fascinating to see how people find our blogs…because I wrote a post about sexy toilet paper you can imagine the search terms around that! There are a lot of sad people out there!
It is the dark web that bothers me more than the sad people, Carole, although I know what you mean. The dark web is a place for the sad people to grow, recruit, multiply…. and have a counter economy, almost. Here in Australia we have policitions demonising poor boat people and paying NO attention to something that is a much greater threat to society.
the dark web is a sad reflection of the society in which we live.
As much as I hate to agree – I agree.