Man, the internet, right? You hear all sorts of stuff, and sometimes phrases just stick in your head, like that ‘guys do porn’ thing people might search for, or whatever. It’s a wild place.
That Time with the Keyword Lists
This whole thought actually yanks me back to this one job I had. Years ago. They called it ‘Content Analysis’ or something equally vague and important-sounding. In reality, it was me and a few other folks staring at giant spreadsheets full of search terms and website snippets. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, was to categorize this stuff for clients who wanted to know what the heck people were looking for online, or to make sure their ads weren’t showing up next to, well, unsavory content.
So, there I was, day in, day out, chugging coffee and trying to make sense of the digital ramblings of millions. Most of it was boring – “best pizza near me,” “how to fix leaky faucet,” you know the drill. But then, inevitably, you’d get the other stuff. And yeah, terms like “guys do porn” and a whole spectrum of other, let’s say, adult-themed queries would pop up. Just the text, mind you. We weren’t clicking links or anything, just categorizing the raw search strings.
Now, you’d think in a company dealing with raw internet data, there’d be a straightforward, professional way to handle this. But oh no. I remember this one manager, nice enough guy usually, but a bit out of his depth. He saw one of these lists we were working on, one that had a particularly colorful batch of keywords. His face just… crumpled. He started this awkward speech about “maintaining workplace decorum” and “not letting the nature of the data affect our personal conduct.” It was like he thought we were generating the search terms ourselves, instead of just analyzing them.
The next thing we knew, they rolled out this super aggressive new filter on our work computers. Supposedly to “protect us.” The results were, predictably, a complete pain. We had all sortss of new headaches:
- Trying to research totally innocent topics for context would get blocked if a word even vaguely resembled something on the ‘naughty list’.
- Communicating with colleagues about certain data sets became a game of linguistic gymnastics to avoid triggering the filters.
- And forget about a quick personal search during lunch break for, say, “chicken breast recipes” – ‘breast’ was apparently too risky!
It made actually doing our jobs, the very jobs they hired us for, incredibly difficult. We were supposed to be sifting through the digital dirt, and they were trying to give us sterilized shovels that couldn’t pick anything up. It was just a classic case of management not understanding the actual work, or trusting their employees to be adults.
I didn’t stay there much longer after that whole fiasco. It wasn’t the keywords themselves that got to me – you get desensitized to text pretty fast. It was the sheer cluelessness of it all. They wanted the insights from the messy parts of the internet, but they wanted us to pretend the mess didn’t exist while we were cleaning it. Go figure.
