Basic Trope: A character searches something on the internet, and gets searches that are undesirable (and often explicit).
- Straight: Bob tries to search up "fun activities for girls" because he wants to do something nice with his girlfriend Alice, and accidentally finds a lot of explicit results.
- Exaggerated: Bob types something completely innocent into the search bar, such as a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and somehow every result contains content that makes Bob try to find the Brain Bleach.
- Downplayed: The results aren't necessarily all that inappropriate, but still have some fairly suggestive content and aren't what Bob is looking for.
- Justified:
- Bob doesn't know that his search was a Double Entendre.
- Bob was looking up a work that has an Intentionally Awkward Title and wasn't careful to specify what he meant.
- Bob had safe search off and forgot about it.
- Inverted: Bob tries to look up "bare naked ladies" and doesn't understand why he's getting completely innocent results relating to the band.
- Subverted: Bob is about to search something up, but Alice comes in and tells him that it might be a good idea to rephrase his search because explicit results could come up. He doesn't listen to her, and decides to search it up anyway. Nothing explicit comes up.
- Double Subverted: ...until he scrolls down a little, anyway.
- Parodied:
- Bob tries to search up "human", and he sees an image of himself searching on the internet like he's doing right now, except he's naked while holding up a sign saying "BE CAREFUL".
- "Agh! All I wanted was to find Richard Boob's 1969 study on determining the sex of chickadees, but instead it's showing me his colleagues' testimonials of how his work helped further the field of avian biology! And they're all naked!"
- Zig-Zagged: Bob searches up multiple things. He gets unfortunate results for some of them, but not all of them. Some of the things he searched up even sounded like they would get explicit results, but the results were all safe for work.
- Averted: Bob goes on the internet to search for something. He finds what he searched up with nothing even suggesting he'll get any explicit results.
- Enforced: The writers are trying to tell the audience to be careful when searching things up on Google.
- Lampshaded: "Yep. I should've phrased that search better."
- Invoked: Charlie tells Bob that typing in a link to a Shock Site leads to "something really cool" without telling him what it is.
- Exploited: Diane, who is Bob's rival, tries to make it look like Bob was intentionally searching for incriminating things in order to make him look bad/get in trouble.
- Defied:
- Bob realizes that his search could be taken inappropriately, and changes the wording.
- Bob turns on safe search to avoid getting anything explicit.
- Discussed:
- "I just wanted to do something nice for my girlfriend! Why, Google?"
- "I tried to search for fun activities for girls, but I found a lot of weird stuff instead."
- Conversed: "Does no one in fiction ever turn their safe search on?"
- Deconstructed: The internet gets very controversial for its detrimental search results, so people turn on safe modenote , hoping that it gives better results.
- Reconstructed: The huge amount of explicit results is to blame on people uploading stuff on the internet, not the internet itself, so maybe you can contact those behind your search engine and blacklist certain sites from the image section.
- Implied: Bob searches something up and grimaces in disgust after seeing the results.
- Played for Laughs: A Running Gag is Bob searching up content that accidentally yields unfortunate results, complete with him making comments like "Uh, what are those two people doing with that giant giraffe statue?"
- Played for Drama: Bob gets traumatized after seeing something extremely graphic or even illegal online.
- Played for Horror: Bob finds a shock video by accident, and he's forced to watch every single second of it... along with us, the audience.
Back to Unfortunate Search Results... oh dear, I shouldn't have looked that one up.
