[gjm11]

Here's a lovely snippet-box example I encountered just the other day (and reported to Google; nothing's changed yet). Search for "tintinnabulum". (Advance warning: You might want to avoid doing this at work or in a public place.) The box at the top contains two things.

1. Some text from the Wikipedia article, correctly informing you that a tintinnabulum is a small bell on a pole in a Roman Catholic basilica symbolizing its connection with the Pope.

2. An image of a sculpture whose title happens to be "Tintinnabulum". The sculpture is of a naked woman riding on a penis-with-legs. The penis has a penis of its own, too. (Regrettably this doesn't continue recursively.)

I am fairly confident that nothing resembling that sculpture is to be found in any Roman Catholic basilica symbolizing its connection with the Pope.

[djsumdog]

I feel like Google stole this idea from DuckDuckGo (correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember them having this first).

If you use DuckDuckGo for "tintinnabulum," you don't get the girl on a penis, but instead a set of five possible definitions to narrow your search. When you click on them, you typically get the wikipedia box, but off to the right as an aside.

I really miss the world of Lycos, Yahoo, Hotbot, Dogpile, etc. If you didn't find what you were looking for, there were other search engines with different algorithms and different results.

Today if Google censors something (removed by DMCA request or government order, which can vary by country, etc. etc.) there are few other big indexes (DDG uses Yandex) to conduct your search. Their index is so massive that the cost of entry into their market is very high.

[diggan]

Judging by the Wikipedia page (but note I really have no idea/experience with this subject in general), it seems to related to phallic figures, so it's no shock that you get a picture with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintinnabulum_(Ancient_Rome)

[Klockan]

From the wikipedia article:

> A tintinnabulum often took the form of a bronze phallic figure or fascinum, a magico-religious phallus thought to ward off the evil eye and bring good fortune and prosperity.

So those images are showing tintinnabulums as well.

[gjm11]

Interesting. But note that that's from a different Wikipedia article from the one the box quotes from. The box quotes from the "Tintinnabulum" article, which talks about Roman Catholic churches; you're quoting from the "Tintinnabulum (Ancient Rome)" article, which talks about wind-chime-figurines with enormous penises.

The photo would make a good accompaniment to the latter article but makes a very strange, er, bedfellow with the one actually quoted in the box.

I wonder whether Wikipedia's "Tintinnabulum" article should be renamed "Tintinnabulum (Roman Catholicism)" or something, and "Tintinnabulum" just take you to the disambiguation page, or alternatively whether those two pages should be merged into an article about small bell-like things, with sections on Ancient Rome and Catholic basilicas. Either way, there'd be less likelihood of a hilarious mismatch between picture and text in the Google answer-box.

[reneherse]

The answer is that many customs and words predate their use in Christian mythology, including the "Tintinnabulum" of ancient Rome.

[jpttsn]

> Advance warning: You might want to avoid doing this at work or in a public place.

Curious but admittedly eloquent variant of "nsfw".