This fiddling has been going on now for over a year year (the ever vigilant RISKS digest noted it back in March 2001). But because of Yahoo’s underhand methods, very few people have spotted the turnabout – certainly far fewer than if Yahoo had done the sensible thing and, say, “**”‘ed out the vowels in the word, or, God forbid, written a smarter parser. But the sneakier you are, the wider the damage spreads. The word “medieval” (since it contains the javascript command “eval”) is converted in Yahoo mail to “medireview”. Google now shows over 640 sites (and 1,150 separate instances) of the word “medireview” being used as a synonym for medieval. University papers, bibliographies and book reviews, Indian newspaper columnists, and endless enthusiast sites drop it unseen into texts. People have begun to ask where it originally came from, and does it have a subtler meaning beyond “medieval”? Is Yahoo ever going to fix its filters? Or is it time we pushed to get the first regexp-obfuscated word into the Oxford English Dictionary?

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.34.html – does anyone still at Yahoo even know how to turn it off?

http://www.google.com/search?q=medireview – NTK now entirely filled with google links