Dangers of using the Google search box – Anglicans helping you meet hundreds of bicurious singles.

Google’s search bar on you site makes a lot of sense. It’s powerful and only takes a few lines of code. But as I observed on the Anglican Media Melbourne Website (http://www.media.anglican.com.au/), sometimes it actually works against you. I had a request for information on "what the church says about sexuality"? I remember there being some sort of "official" statement somewhere, and after chasing link around for a little while ended up at the abolvementioned site. Aha! A google search box. No doubt that will help me find any statement thats been released. So I plugged in "sexuality" an hit go, searching only the Anglican Media Website. That should be safe! Unfortunately it doesn’t just return results from the website, but also sponsored links. Here was what I got:

So there we go. I’m trying to find a statement of belief of the Anglican Church, but instead I find hundreds of thousands bisexual and bicurious singles. I know that using Google adsense you are able to block certain ads, but I am unaware how one can restrict the results if taking advantage of Google’s free site search. Anyone? Hamish Update: I was wondering whether the ads appeared because the site had an adsense account. I found that they are using the default code for anyone wanting to add a cool google search box to their site. It turns out that there is in fact another option that is "safe", and is available from the same page you get the normal code. I would suggest to churches that they test their Google search boxes to see whether they are safe or not. The difference is only a few letters on 3 lines of code. See the differences here: http://www.google.com/searchcode.html Update 2: Well my first follow is wrong (a little bit). That "safesearch" code is only for a web search box, but not for the Google Free web search with site search, which is the one we want to search our own site. I’ll post the changes you need to make to the code to enable the Google Free web search with site search PLUS Safesearch, which I think Google should tell you about on the same page. Congratulations to Melbourne Anglican Media. Within 4 hours of me emailing them they now have "Safesearch" enabled on their Google Site Search. Someone’s doing their job. It now looks like this: