A character goes on the internet to look for something. They type in their query, typically something utterly innocuous. The results that they get...not so much.
Close cousin to I Thought It Meant and The Internet Is for Porn. Sometimes the confusion is caused by a Double Entendre that the person executing the search was unaware of. They are very likely to find Rule 34-related results. Someone may also tell them a term to search for as Schmuck Bait.
Given that most works can't actually show sexually explicit search results, there's often overlap with Take Our Word for It. We may get to see a character's reaction if they see something Head-Tiltingly Kinky, freak out from the Squick, or reach frantically for the Brain Bleach. Or worse, be treated to a description involving Noodle Implements: "What is she doing with that accordion-fold briefcase?"
For bonus cringeworthiness, the unfortunate search results may involve another character in-universe, revealing their Old Shame, or past case of Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!. This might lead to an awkward discussion of "I Was Young and Needed the Money." Shows that play with the fourth wall may have characters come across uncomfortable fan works of themselves.
It's A Small Net After All would be the inverse of this.
Compare That Came Out Wrong and Innocent Innuendo. Contrast Embarrassing Browser History, where characters deliberately look for and find sketchy content.
Confusion may also be caused (or at least alluded to — e.g. "be careful looking that up on Google") with works that have an Intentionally Awkward Title.
Needless to say, this is Truth in Television, and let's just leave it at that.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Alluded to in a commercial for a parental control program. An actor, representing the program, comes in and tells the dad that his son wants to look up "Bikinis", prompting mild alarm from the dad, until the program clarifies that it's the Bikini Islands, for a school assignment. The dad nods his permission.
Anime & Manga
- The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Rentarou tries to search online for stories about people's lives being ruined by cabbage addiction when the girls get addicted to addictive cabbage. But because the situation Makes Just as Much Sense in Context, his search yields zero results.
Fan Works
- One popular and recurring subject in fanart
(link is to the SFW version) is fictional characters googling themselves, usually discovering breathtaking amounts of Rule 34 starring them. This often happens after a character appears in real-life news.
- I Have No Son-In-Law!: To find ways for Rocko to become closer to Mr. Bighead, Heffer looks up "male bondage activities" online and comes across some apparently disturbing results.
Films — Animation
- In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Stan has been told that finding the clitoris is the key to making a girl like him, but no other information about what the clitoris is. At one point, he tries turning to the Internet with Kyle and Cartman. Of course, they get lots of pornographic hits; the one they click on is a German fetish video featuring Cartman's mom.
Literature
- One of the authors in The Naked Truth: Sexual Purity for Guys in the Real World shares an anecdote of when he was teaching his parents how to use the Internet by trying to look up Barenaked Ladies. Let's just say, most of the results had little to do with the actual band.
- In What the Hell Did I Just Read, John, Dave, and Ted get a call from Maggie, the missing girl, who is supposedly at an amusement park called Joy Park. When John searches for it, all he gets it a Korean porn star.
- Played for Drama as part of Kenzie's Dark and Troubled Past in Ward. After being separated from her abusive parents, she bounces around the foster system for a while until winding up with a loving couple who she genuinely likes and who help her with her mental issues. Sadly, one of her issues that she has little notion of boundaries, behaves impulsively, is desperately clingy, and at the time is too young to fully understand sexual activity. So when she searches the internet for "how to show someone you love them" and then carries out what she finds on her foster father, it completely destroys their relationship, sends her back into the system, and the resulting trauma is bad enough that it causes her to trigger and gain powers as a tinker specializing in cameras and surveillance. Tragically, this powerset just serves to reinforce her problems going forward up to the start of the story.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory: Alluded to in one episode. The guys are trying to figure out how to get more women involved in science. Sheldon points out that the approach they're taking targets the graduate level, at which point it's too late. He suggests they start at the elementary school level. He even tries to helpfully search "How to get 12 year old girls excited" before the others wisely keep him from executing that particular search.
- The Good Place: To prove the points system is flawed, Michael uses the example that even buying tomatoes can lose someone a chunk of points due to all the unintended consequences. The Judge is unsympathetic and argues that people should just do the research before purchasing. When she goes to Earth herself, the first thing she does is look up "big, juicy, natural tomatoes", only to find herself on a porn site for people with a sunburn fetish. It helps convince her human life is far more complicated and difficult than she had believed.
- How I Met Your Mother: In "Baby Talk," Lily admits she looked up "how to make a girl" online to find tricks to conceive a baby girl. She follows up with, "Some really weird stuff came up."
- Saturday Night Live In a Cold Open discussing March Madness, Charles Barkley looks up "Vegas women spread" to see the Vegas predictions for the upcoming WNBA game. He awkwardly notes the results were not what he expected.
- What We Do in the Shadows (2019): Attempting to find prey for his masters, Guillermo searches "virgins in my area". The results are blurred but are implied to show porn. He remarks, "I don't know what I was expecting".
Music
- "That funny feeling" by Bo Burnham contains the line "googling derealization, hating what you find".
Video Games
- The Simpsons: Tapped Out: During the "Smells Like Mean Spirit" quest, Lisa creates a ViewTube channel to promote education reform and has to come up with a name for it. Reasoning that she & Janey are "devil-may-care women taking on the academic establishment," her first attempt is "Naughty School Girls," which results in the two stumbling across something inappropriate after typing it in. Janey suggests "something more innocent, like Sparkle Pony Squad," only to find something equally heinous.
Lisa: The Internet is a filthy place.
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner:
- In "Bug in Mouth Disease," Strong Bad pretends that all of Strong Sad's underwear — including his favorite, "The Blue Ones" — have somehow wound up for sale on an Internet auction. Strong Sad tries to find the auction so he can buy them back, and even does an image search for "the blue ones," which turns up "nothing. Or... nothing pleasant, anyway."
- In "Marzipan's Answering Machine 17," the King of Town was searching for "Marzipan Glazed Ham," and got some "weird results" that lead him to wonder if Marzipan was his daughter.note
- Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers:
- In "Mario's Internet Safety", the narrator gives a warning that you should never search your own name if you're a female character in a work of fiction. Bob thinks he's exempt from the warning since he's male, so he searches his name only to find what's implied to be NSFW Rule 63 artwork of him.
- In "War of the Fat Italians 2021", one of the challenges is to see who can last longer on the Internet without running into NSFW content. Tari believes NSFW stands for "Nigerian Spicy Fried Watermelon" because of Bob, so she gladly looks it up only to be shocked by the inappropriate content. Meanwhile, Mario looks up obvious trappings for NSFW content like "boobies" and "thicc fat ass" only to get clean results, but he finds NSFW content when he looks up "Super Mario".
Web Comics
- Hark! A Vagrant: Someone suggests to Kate Beaton that she should write a comic about the letters James Joyce sent to Nora Barnacle. "Well no problem," she says cheerfully, tapping on her keyboard, "let me just look those up." The next frame has her staring at her computer screen in horror, and in the final frame she's haunted by dreams of a leering James Joyce saying I wrote you a letter while she huddles in bed whimpering "Get away from me James Joyce." note
- How to be a Werewolf: Vincent mentions that his family has tried looking up werewolves on the internet to try to help Malaya, but that the results were weird, unsettling and unhelpful.
- The Petri Dish: One strip has Thaddeus sitting on the floor looking horrified. When Bob asks him what's wrong, Thaddeus replies shakily, "Badly... worded... Google... search".
- Questionable Content: While eating at a diner with Dale, Marigold excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Momo makes the same excuse despite being robotic, presumably intending to talk to her alone. While they're gone, Dale commands his glasses (which double as a personal computer) to look up "why would an AnthroPC need to go to the bathroom", then instantly regrets it.
Dale: [yanking his glasses off, eyes tightly shut] SAFESEARCH ON! SAFESEARCH ON!
Web Original
- The Need To Know newsletter had a regular feature called "One of these pics is not like the others", linking to a Google image search with one 'wrong' image (for example, the image for a NSFW video) among the innocuous results.
- Not Always Learning: This history teacher, during a lesson on Victorian England, used Google Images to pull up a picture of Prince Albert for the class... but forgot to turn Safe Search on.
- One Memetic Mutation common in roleplaying circles is adding an edition number to a particularly anti-social search (e.g. "blow up a bridge 5E") so internet watchdogs will understand you're preparing for a game session where that happens.
- In this Texts from Superheroes exchange, Vision says that he's picked Christmas gifts for his fellow Avengers by accessing their browser histories. Captain America gets a box set of the 1942 World Series; the rest get "sex stuff."
Web Videos
- In Brett Domino's first video on "How To Make A Hit Pop Song", he advises that pop lyrics should be sexy. To get some inspiration, he Googles "sexy phrases" and later "sexy women". Both times the camera cuts to an identical shot with noticeably lower lighting, suggesting he was looking at the results for a very long time. Downplayed since the gag is he got exactly what he asked for, but the results were less helpful and more distracting than he expected.
- Inverted in Professor Juice's review of Airblade. When she sees that a company called Porn Star helped create the game, she says she won't research them because she fears the results the Internet will give her. However, an image of a Google search of such shows the only result is for a porn star martini.
- Unraveled: In the episode "When can Mario retire?", BDG tries to figure out the economy of the Mushroom Kingdom. Part of this included him Googling "Mario hyperinflation" after determining the inflation rate for the Mushroom Kingdom is an alarmingly high 15%.
BDG: I got some exciting search results, that were ultimately unhelpful.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball:
- In "The Potato," Gumball and Darwin look up ways to keep Darwin occupied to curb a potato addiction. They look up "things to do with your hands" online and seem quite shocked at the (unseen) results. They do succeed, though, at finding information on origami.
- In "The Catfish," Gumball remembers looking his name up on the Internet and coming across uncomfortable fanart of himself.
- Amphibia: In "Fight at the Museum", Anne searches on her laptop for portals to other worlds, receiving a link to a chat site, the Big Ol' Wiki about the multiverse, and a video explaining how to write isekai fanfics.
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
- In "Interfection", Shake decided to look up teeth and plaque conspiracies... and Metallica. He gets sidetracked by clicking on a bunch of ads, which start filling up the screen... then the house.
- In "Super Hero", Shake asks Frylock to look up "dangerous situation", "girls in trouble", and "press release" so he can find crimes to foil, women to save, and news coverage to gain. The results...
Shake: Sex with animals? There's no time, man!
- Bob's Burgers: Defied in "The Reeky Lake Show" when Linda decides to look for last-minute family vacation ideas, planning to look up options that are "one night only and cheap." Bob says, "Maybe don't use those exact words," and she agrees.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In "The Secret Snake Club", Grim attempts to help the titular club with a summoning ritual by consulting information available on their website. However, because of a typo in the URL, Grim accidentally ends up on what is strongly implied to be a porn site, hastily attempting to cover the young group members' eyes.
- The Simpsons: In "The Great Wife Hope", the town's mothers go out for a night of "crazy bowling", and Marge reveals she got the idea after doing an Internet search for "girls having fun" and found it after scrolling through 97,000 pages of porn.
- South Park:
- In "Over Logging", desperate to find internet porn, Randy pays for a computer simulator to display the results, only to find that the simulator screen depicts terribly-made drawings before giving it up.
- In "You Have 0 Friends", Cartman shows Kyle the Chatroulette site to help him regain his Facebook status, but every time their results shows someone masturbating, grossing Kyle out.
