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Internet Only 1% Porn
Eli Gottlieb writes "In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography. While the calculations were performed using data forced from Google's and Microsoft's search indices by the government, they will help the American Civil Liberties Union to keep enforcement of the Children's Online Protection Act of 1998 banned. A loss for business privacy has become a victory for free speech, even though netizens lose a beloved old proverb."
It is pretty easy to avoid porn if you don't want it, I'm always amused when a relative wants me to scrape all the spyware off their XP box and I suggest this could be avoided if they would stay off the porn. They act all indignant and confused until I pull up their IE history and look through their documents and find the videos they save.
Also, it depends on of they were searching with Google's "Safe Search" on or not (it is on by default; you have to turn it off in the "Advanced Search").
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
It may be true that only one percent of pages on the Internet contain porn, but porn-related spam gets to much more than one percent of Internet mailboxes.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
I'm not in the least surprised it's only 1% of sites. I think the interesting thing is, what percent of traffic is it?
Millions of people can belong to one huge site and spend all their time there. Dozens and dozens of "mini" sites all just feed into the same big site, and depending on how they counted this, those might all be "one site." A whole ton of the porn out there probably isn't indexed, because you have to have an account and log in to the one accessible page the crawler saw to get to the ten million pages of porn behind it. A huge amount of the porn online probably never has anything to do with the web, as it's moving over bittorrent, usenet, gnutella, etc.
Estimates I've seen of the percent of internet traffic that's porn have been much, much higher than 1%.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
That might be the most insightful thing that I've read all week...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I can't be the only one here left wondering ... "if 1% of the Internet is porn, what's the other 99%?"
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Okay, 1% sounds fishy at first, but if you take a look at history, you find that pictures of women's belly buttons, armpits, shoulders, etc. were considered Porn. Now we are far more selective. Furthermore, according to Moore's Law's Inernet Porn Corollary you will see that technology has increased the rate at which porn becomes both more efficient and more easily attainable. Where you once had to pay your older sister $15 to buy you a copy of Penthouse, now you download whatever messed up $&!# videos your perverted heart desires in high res! So 40 years ago we had computers occupying 70% of a research lab, now it's more like 1%. Obviously that's like comparing apples to apples, so it's no surprise the exact same thing happened to internet porn.
Considering the wide array of the kinds of porn and pecadillios out there... I'd say that the study is very likely flawed. To some people, the following are pornography:
;P)
1. Bare tit
2. Celebrity nipple slips
3. Non-detailed butt/bum shots
4. Up the skirt panty shots
To others who are more extreme in their anti-porn views, the following would qualify:
1. Females under the age of 18 wearing skimpy clothing and too much makeup on MySpace
2. Anything with a female of any age wearing clothing that starts above the knee and doesn't cover the legs, or exposes the midriff
3. Anything that celebrates female sexuality in terms of sexual pleasure. It's OK to celebrate it, if it's related to child bearing. Witness the number of couples who tell all their friends and family "we started trying to have a baby a few months ago" without batting an eye, but you wouldn't see them saying "we started trying to increase the quality and frequency of orgasm for both of us a few months ago". With "both" implying that she gets to have a lot of fun too.
The two groups above very likely would comdemn people to death for looking at images of activities like:
1. Gay/Lesbian Sex
2. Orgies
3. Bondage and Dicipline/Sado-Masochism
4. Female Domination
5. Infantilism
6. Furries/Yiff (sexual scenarios utilizing anthropomorphic animals in cartoon form)
7. Bisexual activity of any kind (forced homosexuality in the domination scene all the way to "lesbian" activity in the swingers scene)
8. Cross dressing
9. Extreme body play (super large anal and vaginal insertions. Think: bowling ball in ass or eggplant in vagina. It's been done. Many times. You'd be amazed at how much human tissue can stretch without breaking)
10. Nullo (the voluntary or involuntary removal of genitalia)
11. Amputation (removal of limbs for sexual pleasure)
12. Scat (sexual activity focused on fecal matter)
13. Bestiality (sexual activity with animals)
14. Hentai (anime with a strong sexual focus possibly even including "tentacle sex" and mutilation (typically of females))
15. Hirsute women (women with a lot of body hair who don't shave it off. As some men put it, "wool panties")
16. God/Goddess/Wife worship (people who literally worship their masters, mistresses and spouses in the BD/SM scene and take the worship very seriously)
17. Swingers (real people who engage in free exchange of sexual partners. Typically lots of straight couples and singles with bisexual activity between women. There is very little homosexual activity between men and some groups discourage it due to health concerns based around the lie that AIDS is a "gay" disease.)
18. Cybelle (Wife as goddess figure. Husband must submit to being a literal "human toilet" and ingest urine and feces of wife. Husband is also cut off crom all sexual contact with wife, while wife has right to take many lovers. Husband is also in financial bondage and all money he earns go to wife for her use only. Hehehe... I expect some guys here will say that that's why they got divorced in the first place.
19. Foot fetish
20. Hotwife/Cuckold culture. Wives sleep with other men and their husbands photo/video them for sharing on the net both free and pay. The cuckolds never get to have sex with their wives.
And that's just a smattering of what I've scene in my 16 years on the net as an amateur sexologist/enthusiast. All of the above activities/groups publish photos and text online that the simpler folk of our society would find appalling and unacceptable. Hell, even I was shocked when I found the Nullo, Amputation and Cybelle stuff. But, then after looking at these things I realized that this stuff has ALWAYS been around long before the first bits poured out onto the internet. And as long as humans exist, these things will continue to be around. In the past people did this stuff underground and kept their images, written words and fantasies to themselves. If they were caught, they were likely i
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Several years ago, I founded a photo sharing site, which grew quite large (tens of millions of photos, millions of users). At one point in our growth, we did an analysis of what percentage was adult content. Much to our surprise, it was only at 10%, we were expecting much higher. I do suspect the 1% number of this study is unrealistically low, though.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Actually when you think about that, it makes sense that the percentage of port would be at 1% or lower. Who can seriously afford the bandwidth required for porn? Most web hosts don't allow it for just this reason. I know a couple of sites that just give out torrents and they're practically falling over from the server load.
This might also have something to do with the fact that sex-related topics also aren't the top in web search anymore, now only numbering 3,8% as opposed to 17% (!) in the mid-nineties.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't open the champagne yet; the DOJ can find data in the study to support their claim.
I noted this in the article -
Which raises the question, what percentage of the search terms are of that nature? The report from Dr. Philip Stark states that in addition to the random search terms, 685 popular queries (as counted by Wordtracker) were used in the study. When those search terms were used, the return rate of sexually explicit sites was about 37%.
To me it shows that a lot of people are looking for pr0n (and finding it), so I wanted to see what people are currently looking for. These are the current top 30 search terms, but they have been edited by Wordtracker "so as not to cause offense." Does anyone have access to the current, unedited top 30, 100, 500, etc.?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Last I checked, my pages weren't all made up of 1% porn.
It is more like 82%, but thats beside the point.
Also, this site is not 1% porn either, or if it is, you are pretty ill.
"The reverse side also has a reverse side." - Japanese Proverb
MOST men don't look at pornography. Perhaps not even MOST men on Slashdot. The ones that say "everyone does it" are the ones that do it themselves.
University of Alabama researchers Zillman and Bryant found that prolonged exposure to pornography leads people to overestimate the incidence of almost all sexual activities - particularly sodomy, group sex, S&M and sexual contact with animals. (Paul, Pornified, P226) It's no wonder that porn addicts assume that "everyone looks at porn." Their world-view is so twisted that they can't imagine someone not being interested in porn.
(BTW, there aren't many current studies of the effects of porn exposure, because of the findings of researchers like Zillman and Bryant. The changes in the way people thought after heavy porn exposure were so extreme that research boards will not approve further porn research on human subjects.)
In the words of a friend whose job really was to surf porn professionally, "no job should ever force you to do something that you would otherwise enjoy... it ruins a perfectly good hobby." ;-)
Thomas.
My wrongs with vengeance shall be crowned!
While Jesus most certainly did spend time with the downtrodden, worked to help them, and forgave them, He also told many of them to "go and sin no more." I believe that the incident where Jesus saved the woman caught in adultery would be the most salient example.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.