Chester's guide to: Picking up little girls

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Chester's guide to: Picking up little girls is a non-serious article about the initiation of sex with young girls. In 2003, it came to public attention when an English newspaper started a campaign against the text and finally effected its temporary censorship in a search engine.

1 Background
2 Newspaper campaign
3 Reactions
4 External links

[edit] Background

Chester's guide was written as a ribald joke tutorial how to approach girls of various ages. It was part of a text collection of similarly remote humour in the Internet.

[edit] Newspaper campaign

At the 7th of February 2003 the newspaper Chester Chronicle published a cover story telling that the search string chester guide (looking for a city guide of Chester) at Google returned the website in question as the second result. The lurid article falsely calles the site as a paedophile website and describes the text as real tutorial on child sexual abuse. Many readers followed the included protest appeal. Members of the city's council subscribed to the demand of removal from Google. The leader of Chester City Council openly admitted not to have checked the site since the introductory description had been enough for him to cause approaching Google and demanding a tightening of the law via Chester's MP.

At the 14th of February the newspaper shot again and reported that Google still had not removed the website. Google at first had answered the demands with the false note that the removal was not technically possible. In the following week however, Google submitted to the pressure and removed the website from its index, which was reported by the Chester Chronicle with satisfaction on the 21st of February.

[edit] Reactions

The events caused criticism in the Internet that a moral campaign had lead to the censorship of a search engine. An Internet activist put a critical website about the subject online, which in an ironic twist soon became the new number 2 when searching for "chester guide" at Google.