Learn to Cathoogle

I just learned from a coworker of the existence of Cathoogle (formerly Catholic Google), a Google-powered search engines that touts itself as "The best way for good Catholics to surf the web." It employs Google's "safe search technology" to constrain search results.

My first, juvenile impulse was to look up something smutty, but in the interest of topicality I instead looked up "holocaust denial." The results are heavily screened, pulled from the likes of Catholic Culture, American Catholic, the Catholic Register, so on and on. (Though the Christian Science Monitor snuck in there somehow; oops!)

Then I Cathoogled my own name, and found the many of the listings I'd expect from non-denominational Google.

Then I had a thought. I Cathoogled Liss' name. The result:


Melissa McEwan was a bad request at Cathoogle! Malformed! Illegal, even! Hilarity!

Or maybe not. I had entered her name as a search term in quotes, a normal Google convention for filtering out false or unwanted results. I tried it again without the quotes and - awwww - there were results for her after all. Again, the majority came from the aforementioned Catholic sources (including the fun-loving Catholic League), but also included were some listings from AlterNet, Comment is Free, Majikthise, and Shakesville itself.

When I had looked up my own name earlier, I must have not used quotes, otherwise the same "bad request" error message would have come up.

So! Liss is not bad, malformed, or illegal! Er, yay?

Having sinned against Cathoogle, I must now do penance. Thre Hail Marys ought to do it...except that not being Catholic, I'm not sure how to go about it.

It should be noted that when it seemed as though Cathoogle had rendered Liss a non-person, her response was not anger or indignation, but loud laughter.