How Gay Friendly is Your Search Engine?

Odds are, dear readers, you already know a lot about the concept "gay." You probably are clear on your own orientation, are familiar with your Stonewall history, have seen many of the best gay movies of all time, and you've no doubt already bookmarked the gay-interest blogs that best cater to your pop culture interests. (Hint, hint.)

But let's say you are new to the party and were trying to understand the concept of "gay" starting from scratch. Which of the three most popular online search engines would be most useful to you?

We decided to take Yahoo, Bing and Google on a little test drive to see how they deal with "gay" and gay-related concepts as search terms. We also wanted to see how relevant their "gay" search suggestions would be, and how their mature content search filters might affect their "gay" search results.

The results of this admittedly narrow and unscientific match-up are open to interpretation, but we believe we have a winner: Google gets our vote for gay-friendliest search engine! Below are our findings.

Search Suggestions

Google, Yahoo and Bing all provide search suggestions in a dropdown menu as you begin typing in the search box. This feature is supposed to direct you to more specific and relevant search terms, but on two of the three search engines it fails miserably with the term "gay."

Try it in Yahoo and you'll be given "suggestions" that have absolutely nothing to do with gay interest content. Rebecca Gayheart? That's quite a stretch. 

Over at Bing, the same problem. More suggestions, but none of them touch on actual gay subject matter.