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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I added [fixed] to the title above. Please let me know if that's not accurate!

This specific issue is fixed, but they also added censorship. Try searching NIH.gov for “transgender” and it kicks you out of the search.

According to a comment on Reddit, search problems have been existing for some time - they did not just appear after the DNS issue [1].

Also, I just searched for "transgender" on nih.gov, and got lots of hits [2], the first one being a publication on PubMed [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NIH/comments/1j28ytk/comment/mfs14d...

[2] https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34993517/

Edit: as another commenter pointed out, you have a misspelling which is why your search works. This link is correct and demonstrates the censorship:

https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...

Adding an extra word to censored searches appears to defeat the effect for now. For example, “diversity” is censored but “diversity a” works.

Ooops, yes - I misspellt my search query.

The transgender censor seems to be simple string matching (if query == "transgender"). Just putting the forbidden word in quotation marks makes it searchable, too [1].

I wonder if the filter was intentionally implemented in a shitty way by NIH staff so that they formally comply with an internal order but offer easy ways to circumvent it.

[1] https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...

I appreciate your attempt to clarify here, but your citation link above in 2) is for 'trangender', a misspelling (but it does search successfully).

This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).

Good catch, I hadn’t realized they have a misspelling.

Thanks, you are right!

Just want to point out that I tried this just now and I am not seeing the behavior you describe.

I've heard reports via the NIH subreddit that this censorship was actually added back in January, not over the weekend while Trump and Musk broke the NIH website.

Cool, thanks!

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