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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."
I get "Nothing to see here, move along".
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
that everyone's hard drive pron content percentage is much higher, however.
Dang! Now what am I gonna do with my new Dell?
99% of the people spend their time in 1% of the web
As if this will change the opinions of any of the powers that be in favor of increased legislation and restriction of online content? The argument will shift to "...but that 1% makes up (20 / 30 / 50 / arbitrary number) % of internet traffic! Save the children now!"
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
are link farms to porn sites.
120 chars are not enough for a signature. I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to c
99% useless
A giant, annoying ad floating over the page and they still can't earn enough money to hire a copyeditor who can spell "Microsoft" correctly? How can I subscribe to this fine publication?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Let's face it... The supply of women ready to put themselves out on display on the internet pales in comparison to the sheer mass of teen angst that flows out onto myspace/youtube/livjournals etc. :)
Search engines don't index all of the things on porn sites that are for members only i.e. Terabytes of member's only pages, video, and pics. For example sex.com could only have a few pages for the public that Google would show, but in reality they have thousands more. So it would be hard to be accurate at only 1%
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
People don't view "pages" of porn. They view graphics and videos. Each page might contain several dozen images. Then there are zip files full of images that are never displayed in the page itself and videos that only count as one file. A much better measurement would be the total size of all porn related files vs. the total filesize of the web.
Well, you see it's like this -- the internet contains only 1% "pornography"; but of the remaining 99%, 93% consists of "artistic nudity" and "adult performance art". :-)
1% Porn .3% Good Stuff .01% Abandoned Stuff
49% Erotica
2% Goatse
30% Bush haters
15% Bush supporters
2% Slashdot articles
10% Blogs
8% Math geniuses
42% AOL and MySpace pages
69% Potty humour
80% Top Ten and Stupid Lists
Oh You POS
...to skew the odds back where they belong. --------> (_Y_)
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Google indexes somewhere around 4000 million web pages. This means that the internet is flooded with 40 million pages of porn!
Numbers are great when you make them dance.
Google and Microsoft search indices. Sounds like too pure a fountain to draw from. Try mining from a dirtier source, like my browser history.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared up that little misunderstanding. I guess ISPs can block everything except port 80 now. Many thanks.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Percentages mean absolutely nothing if you don't know the sample upon which the percentage is based.
.com sites? how was the random number generated? presumably sites beginning with "s" (e.g. sex) will tend to be porn sites - was the generator biased in any way? if *pages* were chosen (unlikely, I guess, since it means indexing entire sites, and some porn sites will be pay access, so their pages will be hidden), was it a sample of pages from a sample of sites, or a full set of pages from a sample of sites?
"30% of the Internet is porn".
Was the entire Internet checked? of course not. So what sample was taken? was it a list of random domains, or a list of random pages - which will produce quite different results. If it was random domains, which list was the sample taken from? was it from all sites, or just
Also, pointedly, what exactly *is* a site with porn? do we mean hardcore porn (peneratration) or do we include softcore porn (glamour)? shouldn't we differentiate between the two, and have two percentages?
So propositions like "the xxx is nn% yyy" are so trite that they are meaningless.
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.
During a business trip to Alabama several weeks back, I met a fellow who I'd describe as the typical sort of Christian fundamentalist you'd find in the southeastern US. He's not a bad person, but his views are somewhat, in my mind, unusual.
We were talking about the Internet, and some of the work he'd done speeding up the TCP implementation for an embedded OS. He mentioned at one point that he was worried it'd be used to transmit pornography at a faster rate. I found this absurd, so I asked him to elaborate on what he considered pornography. He was telling me that he thought pictures of the adult women modelling underwear and bras in Wal-Mart flyers were pornographic!
Now, I don't know this guy very well. My best guess is that he's got a raging erection most of the time, but due to the beliefs and customs of the society and religion he has been exposed to his entire life, he's had to build up this anti-pronographic personality. It seems he's taken it to the extreme. But it showed to me the problem with pornography: its definition differs so widely between different individuals.
My maths isn't great, but I did a few simple calculations and that is still a metric fuckload of porn.
Feel free to convert it into imperial. I think rods would be an appropriate measure.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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."
Given the size of the Internet, I find that rather sad. Too many people's lives are damaged/ruined by porn for even 1% to be acceptable. It would be better for society if that number were 0, we'd have a lot less child predators and rapists on the streets. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have the right to debase themselves...I just think it is sad that it is made so easy by the internet.
Doesn't surprise me. Less than 1% of my house's floor space is occupied by dining room chairs, yet somehow I manage to spend nearly 10% of my time in these chairs daily. Likewise, the percent of waking time spent by our household watching the 0.1% of our wallspace occupied by the television is a (disproportionate) 10%.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
On a more serious note: So what makes up the Internet? Webpages or the data that flows over networks.
1% Porn
40% Useless meme and trivia
59% George W. Bush
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
And is that 1% by weight, or by volume?
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.
Add to that the different avenues to pr0n (P2P, Usenet, IRC, etc) that this study didn't even consider that is likely to raise that 1% some. All-in-all, I still think (right or wrong) that pr0n is a big motivator for Internet access especially broadband.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
People could be looking at this from work. You don't want to get anyone fired, do you?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As with any government endeavour they hired scientist, computer experts, and a slew of other specialities. Do you think those people are come back with data that doesn't support their continued existance?
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.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
I'm not sure what this says about me, but it occurred to me that Apple has better market share than porn...
How did they search the whole internet for porn.... And can I have some of the links.
I'm tired of wasting 10 minutes to.... errr.... Wasting 10 minutes to search a topic and finding nothing but porn. I need those links to err.... block the porn... yeah.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
All-in-all, I still think (right or wrong) that pr0n is a big motivator for Internet access especially broadband.
Come on now, you know Joe Sixpack got broadband to watch the MIT OCW lectures. Don't bring him down with bad noise. He needs all the encouragement he can get.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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
o o
*(_Y_)*
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It's 1% pornography and 99% erotica.
metatags can control what a search engine can/can't look at a website.
all the porn sites have to do is put "no-cache" metatags on their pages to keep them off gogle's cache.
now here comes the science. they do research using webcaches as source, come with a meaningles, wrong number and want us to let go of our proverb ???
well, they can have my proverb when they pry it from my cold dead hand!!! the left one, of course. the right is kinda busy right now.
What ? Me, worry ?
AKA "1% by number of pages, 99% by disk space on my computer"
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
Ok, bad phonetic pun, sue me.
I do agree with you to an extent. Even if many households get broadband for a NUMBER of reasons, my guess is that if we had stats on the first website loaded after the Cable installer leaves, we'd have a fair cross-section of the fetish-porn industry.
WTF?!? I know I selected "post anonymously"! Umm, I mean, hey! Someone hijacked my /. account!
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
So what makes up the Internet? Webpages or the data that flows over networks.
Answer: Yes.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
has experienced that one percent
which is totally what she said
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.
Google doesn't measure captcha- or password-protected pay web pages.
Google doesn't measure file-sharing networks.
Google doesn't measure web pages that have robots.txt exclusions.
A much more interesting number than "porn sites" is:
1) how likely are you to find porn if you start at a well-known non-porn site and randomly click on links?
2) how likely are you to find porn on the first page of results on a search engine, if you are NOT searching for porn?
3) for the parents of 14 year old boys: a) how hard is it for my child to find porn if he IS looking for it, b) how effective are i) machine-, ii) router-, and iii) ISP-level blocking tools, and c) how easy can my son or his friends evade them without getting caught?
The first two will keep truly-innocent kids and adults from stumbling on porn. #3 demands both a technical and a proper-parenting solution.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
... the other 98% is porn spam.
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.
While it's interesting to think about, the absolute percentage of all existing Web content that is porn is not really the important question. The important question is how much porn the public sees inadvertantly, and whether federal legislation is needed to protect kids from porn when they are online. If most porn content is hidden behind logins, that lends strength to the idea that such a law is not needed.
Also I should point out that there are vast stores of Web-accessible, non-porn information hidden behind member login as well. Like all of Lexis-Nexis, for instance. Or many newspaper and magazine archives.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
BURMA SHAVE!
liqbase
>Ok, bad phonetic pun, sue me.
We here at the Slashdot Language Police do not use lawsuits for such offenses; we prefer flogging. There is a strong minority opinion that bad anatomical puns should be punished by flaying of the referenced anatomical part. Fortunately for you, the number of Slashdotters able to recognize a pun such as yours playing on rules of spelling and pronunciation is far less than the alleged 1% porn content of the internet, so you're probably safe. This time. You have been warned, however.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
User-driven content ("Web 2.0") has led to a massive increase in the parallelism of page creation. Every single story submitted to Digg becomes a new Web page, as does every Flickr page, every Wikipedia page, every Match.com profile, every Youtube video, every Myspace page, every Slashdot comment, etc.
Some porn sites allow user-generated content (pun intended, eewww...), but overall the number of people willing to share recordings of themselves having sex is probably pretty small compared to the number willing to share their favorite song or interesting link or thoughts on a subject. (At least I hope to God it is.)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Apparently whatever gives you the result you are looking for.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I took the liberty of doing a study for you. Here are the results:
Results 1 - 10 of about 328 for omg poniez!!!. (0.13 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,630,000 for pr0n. (0.12 seconds)
From this I conclude that there is 11067.07X more pr0n than omg poniez!!! on the intarweb. Now, let's correct your spelling:
Results 1 - 10 of about 152,000 for omg ponies!!!. (0.13 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 106,000,000 for porn [definition]. (0.10 seconds)
Now we know that there is 697.36X more porn than omg ponies!!. I'll leave the other calculations to the reader.
Interestingly, the search for "porn" was the fastest search. Somehow they've optimized that one.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Good god. Look, I don't agree with this person, but modding him TROLL?? wtf. Mods, if you don't agree with him, fine, but USE OF MODERATION AS AN ARGUMENT is a fscking misuse of moderation. This person's arguments are not abusive, on-topic, and clearly stated. If you don't agree with him make your case in a reply. Modding him "troll" is even more cowardly than replying AC.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Dude, you're not helping the "Make the Internet Look Clean" cause. You just sacrificed 2 bytes to the porn side of the equation. Imagine what would happen if EVERYONE did that...