Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Loropetalum 'Petite Delight'....hmmm....French pornography???

Remember the early days of search organs when it didn't matter what you searched for, porn sites constituted a significant percentage of your results? Well I had a flashback this morning. I was trying to make size-wise sense out of the many cultivars of Loropetalum. I have the feeling that some rearrangement of ours might be in order if I only had an idea of their relative ultimate sizes. I read Dirr who, helped a bit. Then I Googled a few cultivars. One, 'Ron's Black' doesn't even seem to exist. I moved on. 'Petite Delight' is one of a series of cultivars so I figured I'd get a useful hit or two among the drek. First I tried just "Loropetalum Petite Delight'. Much confusion and many irrelevant sites. So I searched the exact three word phrase; I put it in quotes: "loropetalum petite delight". WOW! My French is not good. I get petite, and, I think petalum (though even in English there occasionally a sense of thinly associated sexual reference). Hey delight speaks for itself but it's that prefix loro that must have done the trick: Four pages of results and every one was a pornographic site????

3 comments:

Amy F. said...

"search organs"? Was that a Freudian slip?
;-)

Amy F. said...

I think somehow that phrase got grabbed and added to those lists of random words that are used by spammers and I guess by porn sites to try to get around certain filters. Maybe this explains it better:
http://blog.commtouch.com/cafe/data-and-research/bayesian-poisoning-in-web-sites/

ChrisU said...

I gues it was a slip; I noticed it as I was typing and restrained myself from pointing it out!