As of the last few weeks google has started censoring sex worker websites from some search results.
Starting from November 1st it appears google started doing something to suppress search results that point to sex work related websites.
Something unrelated to whether people have safe mode on, or off.
The first I heard about this was on reddit.
Over the following few days multiple people posted about this censorship.
So I went to twitter. "X" whatever. Searched for "google", filtered by posts from people I follow and sorted by new then scrolled back to November 1st to see what people were saying at the time when this started happening.
If you're following a lot of sex workers on twitter, I recommend repeating the steps above to get a sense of how we feel about the possibility that google could, on a whim, flush all the hard work we've ever done on SEO and self promotion down the toilet.
If clients can't find us, we don't work. Our success, or failure, in our efforts to make a living as sex workers depends on our visibility in search results. Either via clients finding our own personal websites or finding directories and then finding our listings on those directories. If they can't do this, what are we supposed to do?
People are asking about this on google's help page, so far with no solution.
A lot of people are asking about this on the google support reddit megapost for November too.
It's interesting that something as news-worthy as the world's leading search engine suddenly deciding to pretend sex workers don't exist hasn't rated any mention whatsoever in mainstream news.
The solution for those experiencing this is to log into your google account, go to Settings > more settings > privacy and safety > personal results off.
But how many clients will figure that out?
Not everyone is seeing the censored search results so it may be that google is rolling out this new "feature" to only a selected percentage of their users initially with a view to making this universal after a trial phase.
I recommend using Duckduckgo instead of google. It's a privacy oriented search engine that doesn't track it's users and does not censor search results.
And of course, if you're searching for sex workers, that is what Sex Worker Search is for.
I think it's fair to say that without sex workers, and the adult industry, there would be no internet as we know it.
It's pure hypocrisy that giant corporations like google that make hundreds of billions of dollars per year thanks to an internet the adult industry to a great extent built for them, then censor us.