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Comment by raphman | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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!

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