Eurekster "Security" Features
Peter comments on his unofficial Eurekster Blog about "Eurekster's Porn Blocker". As he notes:
If you haven't read all of my long-winded posts, you wouldn't know that Eurekster doesn't propogate porn-related searches to your friend in order to help eliminate awkward situations: basically to keep it a secret that you look at pornography on the Internet.
[...]
Lesson(s) Learned: If you are searching for porn and you aren't a strong speller or typist or if you type anything other than words that your grandmother would type to search for porn, don't use eurekster if you want to hide it from your eurekster network.
Peter raises an important point about the nature of our new public identities -- they are tremendously exposed in ways that we might not think relevant. In a manner similiar to my first thoughts on Orkut, Eurekster essentially openly uses your social network to attach and relate information its algorithms think relevant. Interestingly enough, it seems to view the consumption of potentially pornographic material to be taboo and blocks it from your network's viewing.
Of course, it's not clear why they stopped with porn. There are too many topics that seem to be taboo. It seems that it would be best to 1) not allow any blocking at all considering the "truth" in that approach or 2) allow you to selectively block queries (there's a box marked private search next to the search box -- what's that for?). I'm going to have to investigate more and see how it develops.