There’s been a ton of talk in the blogosphere about Microsoft censoring certain terms in spaces.msn.com.cn, the Chinese version of Spaces, MSN’s blog service. Shelley of Burningbird has the best writeup of posts and her thoughts I’ve seen so far, and I think her points are dead on. Read the post, it’s worth it.

While I’m at it, while I agree with Microsoft for reasons that Shelley outlines much clearer than I, I’d also like to make a point about language that I’ve observed from the search world. But first, a brief digression.

At one point in MSN Search’s history, searches for adult terms brought up a page that said something like, “This is an adult term, we aren’t providing any results for it you naughty person!” Actually, it was probably a bit more customer-friendly and polished, but you get my meaning. The list was just a text file of a number of naughty terms that had been editorially found or in some cases automatically mined. The problem with this is that people are very, very creative when it comes to smut.

This was highlighted while perusing some of our customer feedback. We were treated to the quote: “How come I can’t get any results for ‘hentai‘, but ‘cocksucking felchers‘ works just fine?” Yeah, um… huh.

You see, the problem with a censorship list based on words is that this just causes people to get very creative about what words they use. “Hentai” which means “perverted” in Japanese typically refers to Japanese porn comics. OK, that’s easy to censor. Well, what about “Hachi?” Hachi is the way Japanese say the letter “H.” It’s also an abbreviation for hentai and in the vernacular means sex. But it’s not like you can easily censor hachi, as it does have some other meaning.

We routinely see this phenomenon in every language. Back last November, a clothing company ran a fun campaign on New York busses — “Read books. Get brain.” The Metro Transit Authority thought it was just a fun play on the “Got milk?” ads, so they ran it. Turns out that “get brain” is NY high-school slang for oral sex. And of course once they started ripping down the ads, the local news promptly made sure everyone knew what was going on.

The point of it is that censoring words doesn’t really do much. Yeah, it’s annoying, and it goes against one of the Big Things this country stands for. But it tends not to stop anything…. people will just pick different words, and once the powers that be discover that, they’ll pick different words again. “Freedom” and “democracy” being blocked? OK… how about “clean water” and “community cleanup.” There… we can now talk about how in China they don’t have nearly as much clean water as they should, and what’s needed is for a movement for a community cleanup to really ensure that everyone has a lifetime supply of clean water. How’s that?

Now, if only we could get a little bit more clean water around here…