Searing Allegation

I'm convinced Photos.com is run by pornographers. My coworkers and I regularly use the site to find images for various projects, and are pleased by the quality of our results - the photographic quality, that is. Make no mistake, it's only the highest resolution, crisp, clear smut that comes up in our browser windows.

Innocuous searches like "business" and "newspaper" invariably get you brazen harlots in negligees - reading newspapers - or cryptic compositions of rose petals on bedsheets, or worse. Many a designer has undoubtedly lunged for the quit button mere seconds into a hunt for a picture of a laptop computer.

The worst part is, you ultimately end up feeling dirty just for typing in the word laptop. "I should have known!" you say to yourself, blushing and apologizing to your officemates, half of whom are aghast and half of whom are sympathetic, having similarly blasted unexpected bondage imagery across their screens earlier in the week.

I heard one girl looked for "rain" images and got monkeys, and I didn't even ask what the monkeys were up to. Monkeys are like that anyway, you know. The whole site is a set-up for squirming...it's like having a sexually frustrated friend who yells "in bed!" after everything you say. Kind of embarassing.

And it's not like I haven't looked for a preference window on the site, someplace I could go to filter my results, ratchet down the filthiness somehow. I searched high and low for any kind of booty blocker, I don't mind telling you, and got nothing.

Although, curiously, when I accidentally typed "frontal nudity" into what I thought was the help window, the images that came up were entirely tame and unoffensive. Office buildings, people having breakfast, walking their dogs, all fully clothed. Hmm.