If you search for “cruise patrol” with innocent intentions, as we recently did, you’ll be surprised to learn that Cruise Patrol is actually the name of a porn site aimed at the gay-male audience. This isn’t necessarily a problem – it’s just that when you search a seemingly innocuous phrase like “cruise patrol” for reasons unrelated to gay porn, you’re probably expecting information about a cruise ship-security outfit, or perhaps some sort of police force that patrols the open waters, protecting cruise vacationers from pirates and other threats.
This is what we were expecting, and in fact we were kind of hoping to find a defense agency of this sort because it sounds like a cool concept. The Cruise Patrol, Guardians of the Free Sea – now that’s something we can get behind. The type of boys who play with stick guns in the woods would perhaps one day aspire to join this elite group of warriors, just as they hope to become Marines or Navy Seals. This is emphatically not what Cruise Patrol is, however.
Anyway, let’s say you are searching for information related to cruise patrol – understood purely as a search phrase – in Google (or Bing, or, in a throwback to the early days of the internet, Yahoo), and you aren’t looking for entertainment of the more morally dubious variety. Will you be able to find anything? Basically, no, unless you are looking for information about the domain cruisepatrol.com, like its traffic statistics or valuation, and even this comes on the third page of search results rendered by Google. In other words, to get to the first page that is not explicitly pornographic, you need to weed through about two dozen links.
While this isn’t really a problem, it is mildly disquieting that a decidedly asexual term like “cruise patrol” is exclusively associated with pornographic material, at least on the first several pages of Google, which are the only pages that the vast majority of people look at. It doesn’t seem quite right that a gay porn site has a monopoly on searches for “cruise patrol.” Sites that feature pornography should be named accordingly; this way, people chastely wondering if there is such a thing as a cruise patrol that is force for good on the high seas, for example, won’t be confronted with miles of links to pornography. If you are looking for information about cruises and security, you should search for terms like “cruise security,” “cruise police,” and similar such phrases. Such searches will primarily bring up information about cruise safety and how cruise ships are policed, which is perhaps what you are looking for when you type “cruise patrol” into a search engine.