The MTA’s bought porn in its Google search outcomes

Pornography is nowhere near the top of the list of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's most pressing problems. However, this does not mean that the agency, which operates the New York subway and bus systems as well as local transportation systems, is not upset that obscene language appears again and again in its search results on Google.

The problem was first noticed by the Queens Daily Eagle newspaper, which published its results in an article entitled "The MTA has a porn problem". It turned out that when you search for a north subway name in Google, you will find a less than delicate-sounding language in your results. And the description kept appearing for at least 13 stations along the Hudson line from Metro-North. This was not an isolated case.

As you can see, as of Monday, July 27th, at 3:57 p.m. CET, the X-rated results are still displayed when you search for the Ossining subway north station.

The MTA would probably have preferred the Queens Daily Eagle heading to include the addendum "- and it's Google's fault". This is because these unpredictable search results were exclusive to the Mountain View-based company. The MTA's search results on Bing and Yahoo were clearly rated G.

I have so many questions about this particular phrase – how can a dildo be flirtatious? I'm so confused – but I don't want to be distracted by the Ribald content as this is essentially a technical problem and The Verge is a technical website. Let's focus on the ones and zeros.

To be clear, these results have not been redirected to actual porn sites. They only appear in Google search results. I see my job as a journalist in taking risks in the service of my readers. With that in mind, I clicked the link and was surprised – and relieved – to see that the MTA's regular, horribly designed website for the Ossining Station appeared.

As already mentioned, the MTA could do without it. The agency, which is facing a budget deficit of $ 4 billion this year and a gap of $ 16.2 billion by 2024 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, is currently frying much larger fish – for example, whether that Federal government will release the money in this way The MTA (and many other desperate public transport companies) can continue to exist. Therefore, a spokesman endeavored to put all of this on Google's doorstep.

"Google needs to fix this now."

"This is an offensive and inappropriate language generated by a Google search algorithm," the spokesman said in a statement. “There is no problem with the MTA website. We contacted Google yesterday to ask them to fix this immediately. Google needs to fix this now. "

For its part, Google was up to the problem. "This is a bug in our systems that we are working to diagnose and fix," said a spokesman. "We apologize for any concerns or violations."

Apparently, the problem is with a file called robots.txt that tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or cannot request from your website. If a page uses robots.txt to prevent certain content from appearing in the search results – as I don't know: "Flirt for something blonde" – Google may continue to list the page and create a title for it from other sources that link to it. Typically, the company's systems prevent titles from being created that may be obscene. This system has failed in this case, and Google is working to find out why.

Google recommends that websites that really want to prevent certain content from creating unsolicited cameos in their search results use the noindex tag instead of robots.txt. Noindex prevents a page from being displayed in the Google entries at all.

The MTA sounds pleased that the search giant will eventually find out what went wrong. "We appreciate that Google is now addressing this unacceptable situation," said the agency's spokesman. "We look forward to Google identifying all possible solutions immediately."

In the meantime, if you really need to know how to get from Metro Central's Hastings-on-Hudson stop from Grand Central Terminal, can I recommend DuckDuckGo instead?