Canadians using Google to find the perfect pearl necklace for their significant other this holiday season may be in for a rude surprise. If you search for pearl necklace on Google Canada, the first result will show you a definition from Urban Dictionary, which is completely not safe for work.
A reader sent us an email about the shock she felt when she saw this search result. Here is a screen shot of the result, with the snippet blocked out.
This does not come up on the first page of the Google search results. Nor does Bing USA or Bing Canada show this result on the first page for a search on pearl necklace.
Google had a similar but different issue with inappropriate and irrelevant search results coming up with a search for santorum but Google made a change that corrected the issue.
Google told us then, the reason why the santorum result changed was because they made a change to the SafeSearch algorithm. Google told us:
We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
So does this algorithm not work in Google Canada?
We have reached out to Google for a comment on this and will update the story as soon as we hear back.