No Wonder I Can't Find Stuff!

Our catalog at work is notorious for picking up highly unusual hits when searching for something specific. We all know the drill. You search for material on the "ozone layer" and your number five hit in the results is the movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, or you search for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and first up you see a biography on Theodore Roosevelt. You wonder where the hits are coming from, who made these bizarre connections and why the one thing you’re looking for is buried five pages deep in your search results, after 75 things that have no conceivable connection.

It’s not exclusive to our library. Not by any means. Do a Google image search any day of the week for something innocuous and see what insane things pop up on the first page. If you’re really brave, turn off the moderate safe search filter and then give it a shot.

For instance, we had a balloon artist at the library recently, which sparked our interest in balloon art. We looked up “balloon dresses” and “balloon gowns” and were wowed. But then we did a Google image search of “balloon bikini.” Wowed was I, but for another reason.

Photo number three on my results was this one, which really does not look like a bikini, but some sort of X-rated toy in use.


It made my mind race. Do people use balloons as sex toys? What if…it…popped?! AHHH!

Part of me was half-prepared for racy pictures doing the “balloon bikini” search, but there was no part of me prepared for the results I got on Amazon when I went searching for a very specific baking utensil.

Martha Stewart might be a pariah in some circles, but I still love the woman. She is far more of a domestic goddess than that disgusting Roseanne Barr ever was, and Martha teaches me a great deal, so my love for her extends beyond the felonies and jail time. She rocks my kitchen.

Anyway, on an episode of Martha’s show a few months back, she turned me on to a delightful and brilliant invention of a brownie pan that gives all your brownies crusts, which are my favorite parts! All crusts!

I’d forgotten about it until recently, and then did an Amazon search for this special pan, only I couldn’t remember what it was called. All crusts? All edges?

My search on Amazon was “edge brownie pan”.

Well, I did find it. Bakers Edge makes an all-edges brownie pan, which I want more than anything, but what I found in addition to my brownie pan kind of shocked me.

I have no idea why a male, push-up thong is the #3 hit for “edge brownie pan.”


Nowhere on that page is the word “brownie” even mentioned, though I was kind of afraid where it might be hiding, given that it is an underwear product.

If you’re brave, go look at the King Style “Balls in One Briefs.” Hello!

Anyway, back at the “edge brownie pan” search results, there are a few other items of note. Hit #6 is a scary item called a Guardian Angel for $150. Given the inexplicable male genitalia booster that hit at #3, I was kind of frightened of what this Guardian Angel would be for. Just look at that thing!


But the claims are that it’s for acupuncture. Uh-huh. Is that what they call it on wholesome sites like Amazon? What this has to do with a brownie pan, I don’t know.

If you scroll down the page of the Guardian Angel, customers who viewed the Guardian Angel also viewed other interesting products, like the UFO Detector, pubic hair dye, and a book entitled Ancient Art of Strangulation.

What kind of screwed up people are looking for my brownie pan, dammit? And why are their psychotic hits effecting my own search results?

Is it because the world is full of perverts that I cannot search for anything without the Internet giving me porn results? Thanks to Leelu, I understand Rule #34, and that there is porn of every conceivable thing in the world found somewhere on the Internet, but brownie pans??? C’mon!

It’s really awful when I search for a brownie pan and I have to remember to also type “-underwear –thong –balls –acupuncture –UFOs –pubic –hair –strangulation”. I dare not ask what else I have to limit my searches to anymore. It seems everything is now connected, no matter how completely unconnected it might seem.

DAMN YOU, INTERNETS!