Google just made some changes to their image search. IIRC, even with safe search off, it won't show you naughty images unless you specifically search for naughty stuff. I forget how it determines if you're looking for naughty pictures.

Maybe google in the UK hasn't made this switch yet.

Was a rationale presented along with the change to remove search results from the pool? Are they irrelevant? Inappropriate? If I have safesearch off, I'm a big girl, and I'm willing to deal with the results of a search for cock or tits. I'm not an idiot.

Are their text searches still okay? I didn't think there was anything that would shift me from using Google as my primary search engine, but that's because I was thinking that no competitor was going to be better. I didn't think they were going to hamstring themselves. How peculiar.

Aha. I did some reading:

We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting -- you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search.

This seems to mean that if I search "cock", I'll get only birds. And if I search "cock porn" I'll get big hard dick. But what about the search that would have returned birds and penises? How do I specify that one? "Cock rooster porn"? But isn't that me informing the search? Sometimes I just want to know what the results are.

x-posty. (Yeah, 10 minutes after your post.)

I don't recall their rationale (I just skimmed the article).

Probably "to protect users from themselves" and/or "avoid controversy for google."

Dunno about text searches.

I had no idea before that that the text searches were being censored either. Why do they pretend, then, that Safesearch is a real thing? Or, rather, that the absence of Safesearch is what it might simply imply?

So, basically, that makes it sound like if I don't know there are nudes of...Kim Kardashian, searching her name won't get me them--I have to know they're there before I look for them.

Why would I not want to switch search engines knowing that? It's not that I'm looking for porn--I'm just looking to be able to ask all the questions.

Where does one find development talent for an inchoate project? Like, someone has an idea for a graphical application on a few platforms, what's the best way to find reliable skilled developers outside of a traditional employment opportunity?

Heh. So, yes, I tried Google search on "cock" and mostly got birds. "Cock porn" produced some genitalia, some naked women, and a head shot of Misha Collins as Cas, looking perplexed. Yes, really.

I sometimes use Duckduckgo for text searches. The problem is they don't really have the equivalent for scholar or of googles image search. Also their special features are all hidden under submenus of the goodies menu which is under "more" which does not strike me as good interface design. But for plain vanilla text searches they seem to be good.

I would try duckduckgo web search.

ETA:

Ha! Slow x-post!

Yeah, I don't have any Cas in my cock porn. A lot of penises, no Castiel.

If duckduckgo doesn't do image searching, then it's not that useful to me. About 1/3 of my searching is image searching, not including reverse (that's maybe another 1/4?). I'll check Bing.