In all that discussion of machine vs. human search, this sort of got buried in the preveious post, so I’m pulling it out for a post of it’s own. Google’s Matt Cutts askes:

I think it would be a great question to open up to your blog. Maybe a good way to do it would be to ask people what their favorite three sex-industry sites are?

Here’s my answer:

Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles
As far as I’m concerned, Violet is the internet’s most passionate voice for sex being treated in an intelligent, adult and fun-loving way.

Adult DVD Talk
ADT is giant repository of viewer-written reviews of all sorts of porn, erotica, and adult films (pick the name you like). I rarely read them. I am, however, addicted to hang out in the ADT Discusion Forums. Purile enough to make things fun, smart enough to keep things interesting.

Blowfish.com
It’s where I shop when I want something new to shove up my ass.

Here’s an answer from Drew Black at ADT:

Here’s three recommendations for quality businesses in the adult DVD retail sector: adultdvdempire.com, xrentdvd.com and bushdvd.com. These three companies are class acts and constantly improve their sites to the benefit of their customers.

We’re still waiting on Matt’s list, but I’m not sure how comfortable he is with sharing his sexual proclivities with the world. But I know lots of you delight in sort of sharing (just as much as we delight in reading it!), so please do – either here, on on a blog if you have one!

I hadn’t realized it until a couple of days ago, but Comstock Films had a celebrity visitor comment on my Will Google Kill Comstock Films post of a few days ago.

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s webspam team, and if you spend any time surfing around the SEO-osphere, you’ll see his name come up rather frequently. Since that comment, Matt and I have had a bit of correspondence about sex on the internet

12.28.06

Dear Tony,

In fact, I’d be curious to hear your take on what several the highest-quality porn-related sites would be these days. I’m familiar with stuff like fleshbot.com or nerve.com, but less so with sites like tiny nibbles or erosblog.com. If it sounds like a lot of work for an email, you could also do it as a blog post. I’d be curious to hear what some of the leading lights are in the porn industry these days, and I’d be able to point a few people at it to make sure that we work on distinguishing higher-quality sites from run-of-the-mill sites.

Dear Matt,

I’m no expert, but it’s hard for me to image what sort of algorithm would be able to distinguish the highly entertaining, very intelligent, but often utterly filthy Pretty Dumb Things (apparently still in the Google penalty box) from run-of-the-mill sites that use similar language in similar quantities, and even in similar, but tremendously less artful ways. That’s not just my opinion either. An interview with the site’s author will be appearing in next week’s edition of The New York Observer, one of Gotham’s most influential weekly papers.

Perhaps that’s why Jane’s, Persian Kitty, etc were successful. Maybe distinguishing run of the mill filth from quality smut takes the human touch. Of course that’s not perfect either. In spite of each of our films taking prizes at film festival, including non-erotic film festivals, Jane has yet to bestow her Quality seal on ComstockFilms.com

In any case, I will give it some thought and see what ideas bubble up. If nothing else, your and apparently google’s ignorance of Violet Blue is a place to start. With nearly a dozen well-loved and best selling books about various aspects of sexuality to her credit, I’d rate her as probably the most authoritative, respected, and independent sex writers on the internet.

12.30.08

Dear Matt,

My wife and I have been hashing this around for the last few days, and some thoughts are starting to coalesce. A couple of things:

The sex industry is, if not actually dominated by, at least characterized by businesses which make their margin by *not* giving people what’s been promised (There is no sex in the champaign room.) By and large, this is possible because of the shame that surrounds sex.

From the outside, the core of Googles core business would seem to be Relevance. Perhaps value-laden taxonomies, like “good porn” vs. “regular porn” are not a useful way to parse the sexual content of the internet. Rather than “distinguishing higher-quality sites from run-of-the-mill sites” perhaps the challenge is to distinguish sexually oriented sites that are what they say they are and offer what they say they offer, from those site that are not and do not. (There is no sex in the champagne room.)

Up until recently, my vision of Google has been a rack of yellow pizzabox CPUs. I have, since my initial post, become substantially more educated about the inner workings of Google (in light of my ignorance, this is not a strong statement,) and have come to realize that I had substantially underestimated the importance of Google’s human assets.

With that in mind, I’d point you to the Boing Boing post in which Violet Blue offers, “I’m guessing that whoever might’ve tested their sex searches didn’t know the difference between Comstock Films and your average skanky porn film site.” Laying aside “skanky” (which is hardly a value-neutral descriptor,) being able to distinguish between Comstock Films, Vivid Video, Evil Angel, Bang Bus, and a TGP link farm would seem to be a key component of producing relevant search results.

As to your question about my take high-quality porn related sites, I don’t know that I’m the person to ask. I have a vitriolic hatred of nearly all porn, both what is produced and how it’s produced. I take my inspiration from the new generation of sex toy makers (Vixen Creations, Njoy Toys, Fun Factory). They make their money by offering well made products, sold honestly. This approach would bankrupt most porn companies inside of a month.

But I do understand what you’re getting at, clean sites, trusted sites in the community, and all that. With that in mind, via my blog I’d like to open up your question my readers and our community. While some of them might enjoy jacking off to Bang Bus (yuck!), none of them like being ripped off or led astray. If Google is truly interested in delivering relevant search results in this area of inquiry, there’s a wealth of knowledge that can be tapped.

Dear Tony,

I’d be curious to see what sex sites people really valued.

—-

It would seem that Comstock Films has caught, or at least been caught up in the Zeitgeist. Just yesterday on my post Google Fails When Language Fails, Part 2 I quoted a Times Online article about a theoretical wiki-based challenger to Google’s algorithm-based approach. Then just this morning I see there’s a Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia, the same fellow quoted in the Times Online article I posted. The human touch seems to be the topic de jour in search.

Meanwhile, whether you subscribe to the Google Porn Purge point of view, or the It’s Happened to Other Industries and It’s Just a Bug point of view, it’s pretty clear that something’s amiss in the High House of Search.

An overly aggressive algorithm when it comes to sexual language, especially sexual colloquial language is certainly an explanation for how sites like TinyNibbles.com, Pretty Dumb Things, or our own Comstock Films could ever be mistaken for spam sites. The implications of that spin off in all manner of troubling directions.

Alternately, if it’s Merely A Bug, and this happens all the time in other industries, the implications of that aren’t particularly reassuring either. (Especially not, if like me, you’re holding Google stock.)

Some of you might be old enough to remember it was human indexing that made Yahoo such a useful tool in the early days of the internet. (I’m not bragging, but back in day, two of Peggy’s projects go the Yahoo Sunglasses of Cool.) Of course the internet exploded, overwhelming Yahoo’s human indexing capability, and pretty soon the only way to get listed on Yahoo was to pay them, completely devaluing Yahoo’s listings, and opening the door for Google.

I’ll confess, my faith in Google has been, shall we say, a little naive. You won’t even find meta-tags on Comstock Films, because I always figured that with the crunching power of those millions and millions of yellow pizzaboxes, *actual* content would count for more than meta-content. We’ll be adding meta-data ASAP, but it looks like we’re a little late to that party.

If Jimmy Wales is to be believed, actually human beings actually looking at webpages is the wave of the future. Will “Real People, Real Search, Real Results” be the tagline of the company that displaces Google? (More importantly, if it comes to pass, how will Comstock Films fare in this new order?)

Meanwhile, Comstock Films’ google ranking on our core search terms has crashed again, this even time worse than before. In some cases so low I quit clicking to the next page when I saw we were out ranked by zoophilia sites. (That’s people having sex with animals.)

Does the googlebot really think that people searching ‘couples porn’ are looking for pictures of women getting fucked by horses? I’m not ready to take a short position, but I do think I’m ready to sell half and look for other opportunities.

And oh yeah, Matt’s question looks like it just begging to be my first ever blog meme:

What are your three indespensible sex URLs and why? Me?

Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles
As far as I’m concerned, Violet is the internet’s most passionate voice for sex being treated in an intelligent, adult and fun-loving way.

Adult DVD Talk
ADT is giant repository of viewer-written reviews of all sorts of porn, erotica, and adult films (pick the name you like). I rarely read them. I am, however, addicted to hang out in the ADT Discusion Forums. Purile enough to make things fun, smart enough to keep things interesting.

Blowfish.com
It’s where I shop when I want something new to shove up my ass.

Your turn, Matt. And everyone else too!

From The Times Online

“Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

Of course human beings are notoriously capricious when making judgements about sex.

Update 12.31.06, 9:15

As Matt Cutts notes in the comments, the good news is that searching ‘prettydumbthings.typepad.com’ now returns Pretty Dumb Things, the blog associated with that domain in the top position.

The bad news is that the Google is dumber than ever about Comstock Films. On the search ‘couples porn’ the googlebot is currently ranking zoophilia sites pages high than Comstock Films. What kind of sex are they having over there at Google that a search return like this makes sense? It sure doesn’t look family friendly to me.

——

I know, I know, it’s just a bug. Whatever. As of 9:30AM December 30th, 2006 it’s still not fixed.

(Call me crazy, but I think if you search ‘prettydumbthings.typepad.com’ then prettydumbthings.typepad.com should be the first return.)

It’s official! Blowfish is the first US retailer to officially place an order for MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER, and we couldn’t be happier!

Blowfish was the first US retailer to pick up MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY (dig the old cover!), and the first retailer to pick up XANA AND DAX: WHEN OPPOSITES ATTRACT and DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER.

But then, that’s what Blowfish does – they find the good stuff, and they find first. Blowfish is where I first discovered theVixen Creations String of Pearls. Blowfish is where I discovered the wonderful work of erotic jeweler Jullian Snelling. And it was back in around 1995, after seeing that not even Blowfish had the kind of sex films that I wanted to see that I concluded that they must simply not exist and that I’d have to make them myself.

Indeed, aside from pleasing myself, one of my thoughts as I embarked on this quixotic journey was “I want to make something that people who shop at Blowfish might like.”

Anyone want to make a bet who will be the first to carry ASHLEY AND KISHA?

If you go back and take a look at my first blog post you’ll see that writing about my work is a relatively new thing for me. I have been known to say “If I could write words to express what I want to express, I wouldn’t have to make films!”

And in someways that would so much easier. A writer needs but a pen and paper and her imagination. She can choose to use whatever words she likes; there are none more costly than others. Even on my tiny little films, I depend on a couple dozen other people to put their art and craft and sweat in the service of my vision. The equipment and supplies needed to make movies is expensive. The people who know how to make or use these things have bills to pay, so they need to be paid.

But the result of all this effort and expense is that my expression is (to some degree) liberated from the limits of language. I can explore and express ideas that we simply don’t have the right language to enjoy in words alone. This is especially true when it comes to sex. Indeed, even after 10 years of making these films, I continue to struggle to find words for what makes these films what they are, and I’m not alone. If you read what other people write about our work, it is often described in terms of what it is not.

Describing what these films are is more slippery. Selecting the words for sex, which is at the very heart of these films are, presents an array of disheartening choices. Shall we go medical/educational; penis, vulva, coitus? How about defiantly earthy; cunt, cock, fuck? Are these films frank or hardcore? Adult? Erotica? Porn? Or maybe a little bit of all of them, and perhaps something more as well, something that doesn’t yield words alone. Something that must be seen. Something that must be felt.

Google is a language-based business. It can’t listen to music, it can’t look at pictures, and it certainly can’t watch our previews. The googlebot comes to a site and registers words like “penis” and “vulva” and “coitus” or “cunt” and “cock” and “fuck”, and applies its algorithmic logic as it sees fit. It’s ability to understand what we do it limited by the shortcoming of the language we have to talk about sex. To the googlebot, sex is a biological function, or it’s adolescent prurience. There are no other words, so there are no other ideas, no other taxonomy, no other categories.

At least not in Google’s universe of words – which is why I choose to make films.

Some responses to people who commented on yesterday’s post:

M&K, I don’t think it’s censorship. The “adult internet” is rife with people who really have nothing to offer the world save their efforts to juke search results. It’s a different kind of spamgame, but in the end it’s volume driven, with few penalities for a low signal to noise ratio.

I think what happened a combination of Google trying to find a way to create a penalty, but without giving much thought to the way it’s approach might penalize people searching for sex information or products, or how it might harm people offering sex information or products. And why would they? What we do is very much a marginal activity, and there’s no real gain for Google to care about TinyNibbles.com or ComstockFilms.com. Frankly I’m shocked that Google has taken any interest at all.

AAG, Certainly an atrocious result. I think the motives are more a result of the confused status of sex in our culture than on anything specifically unwholesome at Google.

Matt Cutts, I’m glad we have our name back. I hope that our high ranking on relevent searchs returns as well. Among our top 50 referrers (Google used to be first or second every week) our organic Google visitors had the very highest page count per visitor. From that I’d infer that the way we were ranked last month was delivering quality search results to the people who came to our site via a google search.

Trip Hazzard, I’m glad we have our name back. Time will tell about the rest.

Inquistor, Thanks for checking up. There were a couple other similar sites that I didn’t name. Google seems to have re-connected some of them with their name-searches as well. I couldn’t say how their other search traffic has been effected. But there are others that are still out in the cold.

Halfdeck, This entire line of work is a crusdade. Thank you for your concern. Perhaps you’d like to chime in here.

Jason, Your comment might be interesting if it was informed by 1) facts. 2) an adult’s understanding of how the world works.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed something distressing in our daily site statistics; our google search referrals, which over time had risen to about 300-500 visitors/day on 100-150 search strings/day started to vascilate wildly. One day that would be typical, the next the would fall to 50-100 visitors on a few dozen search strings.

Then on Christmas Eve they crashed completely, a couple dozen visitors on a handful of search strings. A month ago we were getting 40-60 visitors/day on ‘couples sex film’ alone. Yesterday we got one. Other search terms relevent to our art and business have been similarly effected. In fact, since the Christmas Eve crash, we haven’t had the number of visitors on a single Google search string climb out of single digits on our daily search referrals.

But even more distressing than dropping off Google on the sorts of search terms that might lead the people who don’t know who we are (but do know that they want what we offer!) to our site, Google’s reshuffling has dropped our site on searches like ‘comstock films’, ‘www.comstockfilms.com’, and ‘tony comstock’.

That means the next time we get a mention in Esquire, The Metro, Penthouse, Jane, Women’s Health, and other magazines (after each of those mentions our Google referrals on the search ‘comstock films’ rose astronomically) people will have to click through several pages of returns before they actually find comstockfilms.com. The DIY trip, especially the DIY distribution trip, is built on the premise that If You Build It They Will Come. But that only works if people can find you, and it doesn’t help if the 800 pound gorilla search engine starts making it harder for the people who are actually looking for you to find you!

Now as it turns out, this is not a Google vendetta against Comstock Films. Google’s re-sorted the way they rank the entire sex/adult world, and everyone from pussy.com to Babeland.com has been effected. (For more read Google Delivers a Lump of Coal to Babeland.) It takes the sting out of it to know this isn’t something we did or didn’t do.

But it is going to hurt us. Our Google driven visitors are some of our best traffic. Both before and after Google’s re-ranking, people who come to the comstockfilms.com site via a Google search look at more pages and buy more DVDs than almost any other of our visitor sources. (In other words, people who find us through Google find what they were looking for.) If the current Google traffic pattern holds (and associated sales), the re-ranking will all but errase the financial gains we’ve made with the release of our new title, MATT AND KHYM.

Will this actually kill Comstock Films? No, I don’t think so. But it will make things harder, and it’s distressing and discouraging to watch something Peggy and I have worked hard to build go up in a puff of algorhythm alchemy smoke

ASHLEY AND KISHA is nearly finished, and we had sketched out a little marketing and promotion strategy for the next year (perhaps you’ve seen the beginings of it on some of the interweb’s finer blogs and websites) that was to have been fueled by additional revenue that our new titles and (until recently) ever growing web-sales was to have funded. We’ll just have to see what the medium term effect on sales is and see if the plan still makes sense.

It’s also a bit of a bummer to be looking at Christmas gifts and feeling like it might have been better to save the money for a rainy day. I didn’t need the Shuffle that Peggy got me (I’ve been borrowing hers to go running,) and that’s a month of advertising on a popular blog that sends us a steady stream of visitors, and each month a few of those turn into customers.

As I said, Comstock Films isn’t alone. If you google our friend Violet Blue, you’ll get a link to her podcast feed on the the first page, but tinynibbles.com is no where to be found. But what’s worse, you won’t see tinynibbles.com on the first page of a google search for for tinynibbles either! (This morning the first link to tinynibbles.com on the fifth page.) Chances are your favorite sexually related site is similarly effected.

What can we do? Well for starters, you can tell Google you’re not happy with the search results their providing. Google comstock films or tinynibbles or whatever your favorite might be, and if it’s not listed where you think it should be, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Dissatisfied? Help us impove link. Will that actually help? Who knows. It probably won’t hurt. (I happen to think that if someone googles comstock films, they should see comstock films on the first page, if not at the very top!)

And so it goes, the business of making art (and trying to make a living!) at the margin of culture. (Which seems like an odd place for films about real sex between real couples, but what do I know?)

Just in case you were wondering how to say “Tony Comstock” in Russian. With the help of google’s translation tools:

“[The film] is able to convey a strong erotizm everyday life, which does not end when the cameras are off. This is not a rogue proximity, there is an attempt to portray a pornozvezda Jenna Jameson. Sex is portrayed as a natural element Romantic proximity, and charges of spectators positive sense, Aesthetics which disappeared from pornographic films in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

I’ve made more than a few posts on this blog about how technology has changed the business and art of photographic sexual imagery. I’ve made posts about the VCR, posts about the CCD chip size in digital cameras, posts about how fantastically capacious and inexpensive DVD replication is; and how all of this has contributed to how today’s porn looks, feels, and is sold.

Throughout my now two decade “career” as an artist, I’ve always felt like there’s a certain antipathy towards this view of the creative process. There’s this notion that the creative impulse is pure, that it (should) transcend technology and rise above money. The notion that art might be inhibited (or empowered!) by technological or financial considerations seems to lay at odds with our culture’s romantic notions about the artist as a pure and unfettered being, beholdent only to her vision, and willing to make any sacrifice in the pursuit of that vision.

So imagine my fanscination (and perhaps a sense of vindication) when I heard “How Painting Advanced with Paint Tubes” on NPR on my way home from dropping my daughter off at school this morning. I had long been familar with the way that the new, vibrant, synthetic pigments had helped to usher in Impressionism, but I had never considered how the portability of putting that paint in a tin tube had effect where an artist would paint, what an artist would paint, and how an artist would paint.

(In school I did get into a bit of trouble writing inflamatory essays about how the Deguerreotype had, in the space of about 10 years, rendered painting utterly irrelevent as an art form, but that’s a subject for another post on another day.)

Well not me actually. Fist Kirby Ferguson and The Wet Spots!