What Al Gore Intended?

Very late one night, a policeman was walking his beat and saw a man, looking a bit tipsy, furtively searching around the base of a lamppost. He asked what the man was doing.
"I lost my keys," the inebriated man said. The policeman wondered, "well, is this where you dropped them?" The man said "no, I lost them over there," pointing down the dark street. The policeman somewhat incredulously asked "then why aren't you looking over there?" The man, slightly exasperated, replied "because the light's better over here."

--Old Story


A recent post on Sugarbank points out that half of the top 10 most-read articles on Wikipedia in August had to do with sex. The top 10 list:

1. Wikipedia
2. Pluto
3. United States
4. List of gay porn stars
5. Sexual intercourse
6. Wii
7. Wiki
8. List of sex positions
9. Kama Sutra
10. Pornography

Ok, well that's Wikipedia. And it's just one month. Is porn mostly what people are looking for on the net?

Going to the ultra long-term view, here are the top 10 search terms of the last 10 years, from Lycos:

1. Pamela Anderson
2. Dragonball
3. Pokemon
4. Britney Spears
5. WWE
6. Tattoos
7. Las Vegas
8. NFL
9. September 11
10. Christmas

Not a porn search in the bunch. (Although some might consider the entire top 10 list "pornographic" in the larger sense.) But 10 years is way too long a timeframe. The net and its usage patterns have changed too much over that time.

Google has an interesting site called Google Trends, that measures the popularity of search terms.

Below is a graph comparing the popularity of the search terms "porn" and "terrorism."



The blue line represents porn, the red line, terrorism. The top chart is relative searches, the bottom chart is relative news references. Strikingly, terrorism is in the news a lot more than porn is, but people are searching for porn a whole lot more than they are for terrorism. (The letters represent the dates of (apparently) randomly selected news items about terrorism).

Well, in turns out that that doesn't necessarily prove too much. The following terms all trumped terrorism handily in searches:

Mircosoft
Biology
Spyware
Coffee
Diabetes

And so it goes. Substituting "current events, "current affairs," or "politics" for "terrorism" yields similar results. And it's not just news, per se. Porn and the above terms were searched for a lot more than investments, health care, Democrats, Republicans, Congress, etc. (For what it's worth, the search volumes of "porn" and "weather" run pretty much neck and neck over the last 2-plus years. Make of that what you will.)

But the Internet, it would seem, is not so much "for porn" as it is a convenient place to look for it. If one wants to know about terrorism, one has multiple sources for that -- most cable subscribers have access to three or more 24-hour news channels, for instance. Porn's harder to get at anywhere else. Similarly, the term "mp3" is searched on more than "porn" is. Another item where the Internet is the primary place to look.

People look for stuff where they can find it and quickly become efficient at it. The stuff they can find elsewhere (or are exposed to without their necessarily requesting to be exposed to it), they're less likely to go and find the streetlight to look under.