Comments: Free porn, Google, spam, Internet censorship, and the Supreme Court

Brilliant! Hard to argue with your logic seth - although we know that logic has not sat well with US law makers on this issue before, nor worryigly the Supreme's if CIPA was anything to go by.

Posted by Scott at March 3, 2004 11:00 AM

Seth, your search returned more "sites available" than did Olson's, so "jokes" aside, I don't know what you're crowing about.

Posted by Jack Stephens at March 4, 2004 01:56 AM

An overwhelming majority of those six million pages are automatically generated to increase some porn site's PageRank. Many such sites use scripts that generate a near infinite amount of pages for spiders to find. This does not mean that any human has ever visited the pages, nor that they actually contain free porn.

Posted by Ilari Sani at March 4, 2004 04:10 AM

Google limits all the search results they'll show to the top 1000 only. They claim that they're not trying to give you a list of all results, but the most relevant - and if it's not in the top 1,000, then it's not relevant. So, while the rest of the points you make are good, that last point doesn't hold up.

Posted by MIke at March 4, 2004 05:29 AM

This post might get a lot of traffic. And it might annoy some site listed at the top Google page for those search terms by pushing it off by tomorrow.

Mr. Olson's statement is quite obviously wrong already because Google indexes pages, not websites.

He might still be right about the assertion that online porn is increasing. However, to qualify as evidence for that point he would need to give comparisons to the number of pages found in earlier searches.

Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at March 4, 2004 09:08 AM

I have not seen that Olson mentioned Google by name in his testimony. Did I miss this? For Seth to argue that "very similar" in Google is the equivalent of "non-existent" truly is a joke.

Posted by Jack Stephens at March 4, 2004 11:59 AM

Mike: Correction made, thank you.


Karl-Friedrich: So far, around 200 readers. Fifty+ from a mention on librarian.net
That's indeed a lot of traffic for me. Sigh. Why do I bother?

Posted by Seth Finkelstein at March 4, 2004 01:54 PM

why dont u customise the layout :/ the default one sucks

Posted by yam at March 4, 2004 05:03 PM

The thing that your post fails to cover is that there are other search phrases for which some of the other 6,000,000 pages will show up for.

I still think that using one search on a single search engine database as a basis for censorship law is one of the dumbest things I have ever read.

free porn free porn free porn...so what?

Posted by aaron wall at March 8, 2004 04:12 AM