We now interrupt our regularly scheduled absence of programming with a public service annoucement: Super Google has done it again. Not being evil, that is. This has resulted in a suprising lack of results if you happen to ask the wrong question. Like this:
About 62 results about “lolicon”, even though the first page advertises 1.5 million hits or so. Login status, SafeSearch settings, private browsing, etc. do not substantially affect that number, and neither does displaying the “omitted results”. See for yourself. For comparison, Yandex claims around 400,000 answers on that search term, and lets you browse 100 pages of results.
More generally, Google has suddenly stopped providing meaningful results to related search queries (anything that includes “loli”, “lolicon”, the Japanese katakana versions ロリ, ロリコン, and possibly more terms), apparently within the last 24 hours. For example, you cannot find the Japanese Wikipedia page about this subject on Google anymore, unless you look up the unabbreviated, much less used phrase ロリータ・コンプレックス (lolita complex) directly. This has caused a bit of a commotion on my corner of the Japanese Internet, including among people known for their level-headedness, like Nakagawa Yuzuru, associate professor of film studies at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. And I agree with them that the situation is pretty outrageous.