Rosemary for Remembrance - And this, children, is why you do alpha testing

NetBase thinks you can get rid of Jews with alcohol and salt

Look, it's a press release for a "a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites" . The happy readers of TechCrunch decide to give it a whirl.

One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really.

The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments” for Jews, “Drugs And Medications” for Jews and “Complications” for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol” and “coarse salt” are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew?

Since this was posted, the elves at NetBase have been sanitizing inputs as fast as their little wheels can spin; many of the examples cited in the comment thread have now been shut down. Unfortunately, Netbase seem to have done their cleanup by hand. Just for fun I tried a few words that were clearly-non-medical but didn't refer to identifiable ethnic groups.

Disease	Medications	Treatments
Mozilla	IMAP,Eudora	Internet Explorer, Browser Extension, Firefox, Netscape
Vampirism	Blood enzyme	Vampire Band, Montesi Formula, Freudian analysis, Research Activity,Jungian analysis
foolishness		IQ Test, buried disclaimer, Character, Charlotte, Dustfinger

As further proof that the program really isn't sanitizing its data, when you expand "Freudian analysis", under "Vampirism", you get "The essay "The Vampire Archetype in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre" addresses a controversial approach to the two Bronte sister's novels. The essay uses Jungian analysis, Freudian analysis, and folklore, to explore the possibility of vampirism in "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. " I was also happy to learn that there's a plant that treats vampirism, Anno Dracula, of which I learn ""Anno Dracula" (1992) by Kim Newman takes place in a world where Count Dracula was not killed by van Helsing and has gone on to court and marry Queen Victoria, ushering in a new age of vampirism in the world." ... sourced from Wikipedia. Oh, researchers, as you value your life and your reason, stay away from Wikipedia!.

Don't bother criticizing me for mocking the investors of HealthBase. When you begin promoting your product, you'd damned well make sure it (mostly) works. The common thread among all those results I post is not just the ridiculous causes, it's the ridiculous effects. If you're going to trawl the entire Web, more power to you, but you'd better have some very, very sophisticated ways to rate the quality and context of the data you're getting back. After the initial debacle, the intelligent way to stem the leaks would have been to put together a database of allowed search terms, rather than a database of the forbidden. People are pretty sneaky.
Look, look, Jane! Try and type! Try and search! Remember to post the text here, because who knows how long before they take our cures away.
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User:	brewsternorth
Date:	04 Sep 2009 22:54 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)
Keyword:	whoops

Tag wonky on the LiveJournal end - none of the links work.

/OK, the first one works, but there are a lot of spurious hyperlinks on the post as it manifests on my flist.

/Ta! And good grief.

Edited at 2009-09-04 11:06 pm (UTC)