Words you must never search

Editor’s note: Work in Progress

About

Words you must never search (Japanese: 検索してはいけない言葉 or ググってはいけないキーワード, lit “Keywords you must never Google”) are keywords that may inflict deep trauma on users who search them using search engines. It’s kind of like a Japanese equivalent of searching shock sites.

Origin

“Words you must never search” began to be compiled in the Japanese anonymous text board community 2channel. Threads for gathering keywords which search results have extreme gore, computer viruses, shocking facts, and deeply depressing stories had been occasionally posted to 2channel since early 2000s. But the first succeeded thread in this series was born in 2channel’s /occult/ board in January 2008.^[1]

Spread

These keywords are often shared on sites such as Naver^[2] and YouTube^[3] and are also spread word-of-mouth as well as on social networking sites. There is also a wiki dedicated to these keywords ^[4].

Notable Examples

Note: It’s a tradition to avoid directly linking the content to the keywords when introducing them. The user must search it themselves.

• モーターサイクル(モタ男)[Gore]: A gory photo of a man who lost his face
• 愛の妖精ぷりんてぃん; A very Denpa^[5] website
• exe ファイル 捨てたい: Malware that will leak your personal information
• 先行者: Senkōsha
• POSO[Gore]: A video footage of a religious war that occurred in Indonesia from 1998 to 2001^[6]

Search Interest

External References