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First off - the Altavista doesnt matter anymore as they got bought by Yahoo and are using Yahoos index
As far as censoring results - Google already does do it as Alex mentioned above with terms like "sex" for English speaking searchers where they have censored the results for the last 2 years - they didnt used to and it was an amazing source of traffic (although pretty shitty)
A good comparison instead of using the hl=en term in the search results URL for google would be to look at the results in russian (hl=ru) - those are partially geo-filtered and uncensored for the term "sex"
Google has always also filtered results for some other things - especially when it came to their AdWords advertising with things like cigarettes (they dont allow ad campaigns for smoke resellers) and guns, casinos etc.
As far as search engines saying that they censor publicly - probably not going to happen in the US - not Google anyway and especially not for something like adult terms. The word sex is just one that they started censoring when Google first came about and they turned off the censoring for a few years then reinstituted it at the request of their owners.
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