It's all fun and games until the My Little Pony porn shows up. (I mean, unless that's what you were searching for.)
According to Deadspin and The Verge, Apple's new iMessage GIF search feature is occasionally dredging up rather unsavory finds.
Apple's iOS 10, which launched this week, includes a bunch updates to Messages that are intended to improve communication. You can now insert stickers into your messages and another feature lets you search and share GIFs very quickly. However, users are finding that these searches don't always go as planned. An 8-year-old girl who searched for the word "huge" discovered a GIF of a woman performing fellatio on something, well, huge. Deadspin discovered that a search for the word "butt" surfaced a very NSFW GIF of a My Little Pony. Apple has since banned the word "butt" from pulling up search results (plenty of other more graphic or suggestive words were banned from the get-go).
After some of our own dirty searches, it's clear that Apple has done an exhaustive job of trying to keep its GIF search clean. But the internet being the internet, you can still find something that might be considered inappropriate (or borderline pornographic) if you try. A search for the word "chest," for example, does churn up an image of jiggling breasts (do with that information what you will.)
As anyone who's used Google would know, search engines are not always morally faultless. A quick search for "eggplant" might lead you to a very unexpected place if you're not hip with emoji slang.
Both Apple and Google try to keep their operating systems free from overtly inappropriate content, so it's not like you're going to find butts in the Bluetooth or anuses in the App Store. But GIFs are GIFs, and well, sometimes the results just aren't what you'd expect.
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