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."

Comments

More than one percent porn spam

[yancey]

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.

Of course it's only 1% of sites...

[Phat_Tony]

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%.

Quote From TFA

[MightyYar]

``What we are learning about the Internet is that it reflects life and that the Internet is not -- contrary to what some people might think -- more sexual than people are in general.''

That might be the most insightful thing that I've read all week...

How do you define pornography?

[eno2001]

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:

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. ;P)
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

About web search

[nieske]

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.

Re:Don't blame just the policy makers.

[El Torico]

Yes, that's EXACTLY what they did. The government was trying to prove that there is a need for COPA. Instead they proved that there isn't.

Don't open the champagne yet; the DOJ can find data in the study to support their claim.
I noted this in the article -

Stark's study found that only 6 percent of all queries returned a sexually explicit Web site, despite the consistent popularity of queries related to sex.

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.?

Re:I suspect

[tosk_p10]

I strongly recommend you listen to Dr Drew's radio show Loveline (mp3's can be found here http://www.lovelinearchive.com/ for a while at least). He's an actual doctor, not a radio doctor, and he has been taking calls on sex and addictions for over 10 years, and the subject of stripping/porn acting/prostitution comes up regularly. Basically, anyone working in the sex industry believes they are just doing it for the money, or it's what they want, but invariably they suffered some sort of tramua as a child, sexually abused by a family member usually. Now stripping is on the light end of this spectrum, so I wouldn't want to say I know what's going on in your roommate, or his student's mind. But people who have sex with strangers on film are not "perfectly normal", and do not have stable happy lives. It's worth bearing in mind that we as humans are really bad at understand just what it is that motivates us. But again, do not take my word for it. It is actally amazing how much Dr Drew can tell from a caller, just from talking to them for a minute or so.

Thomas.

Re:I suspect

[RsG]

Think of her children on the playground, "Your mommy is a slut!" or "You're a bastard!"

Would those children face those same insults if people like yourself didn't teach them that their mother was somehow in the wrong? Your beliefs make sex dirty, ergo when your children are the ones flinging insults like "slut", the blame lies with you.