I had lunch at Google's London office today. They're fed well, these Googlies. And their guests...

On the way out I noticed that, next to the reception desk, there was a scrolling display of search terms that people are currently using.

This is standard now in many of the Google offices, I believe. Here, it was rather nattily projected onto frosted glass.

On the way home, I was wondering how they... ahem... sanitise it. Obviously, there are some search terms that could simply be excised using a checklist. Others could be filtered out based on the content that was actually returned as a result of the search.

But I wonder how many embarrassing phrases, politically-controversial assertions, etc, slip through... Can they filter it algorithmically? Or is there somebody hidden away on some Google campus whose job it is to weed out the unpresentable?