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'Porn King' Says Google Should Block Porn Access
mikesd81 writes "The Register has a story saying that one of the world's biggest porn producers wants Google and other search sites to put up barriers between kids and adult entertainment. 'Steven Hirsch, the co-chairman and co-founder of Vivid Entertainment, is to deliver this message on Saturday in New Haven, Connecticut as he addresses an army of Yale University MBA candidates. "Responsible companies in the adult industry such as ours have done a great deal to deter minors from accessing adult material," Hirsch proclaims from inside a Vivid press release. "None of the search engines and portals, but particularly Yahoo and Google, has taken any significant steps in this direction.'"
The OP brings up a very good issue. Webmasters should have a means to tell search engines what type of content is ok to index vs what kind is not. For instance, a plain text file at the document root that spelled out what subpaths were ok to spider and cache or not. We could establish a convention for this directive. Perhaps a convention of calling this file of directives something consistent across sites... a 'robots.txt' if you will. Oh..... wait.....
Seriously though, perhaps it is time to extend robots.txt to include more metadata about more conditions where content can be spidered. Simple augmentation of paths with a few tags such as NSFW, Pr0n, and goatse could go a long way to helping.... blah blah.. insert semantic web tripe here....