Google Fails When The Sex Industry Fails
In her follow-up post, Google is Still Pretty Broken, Violet Blue writes:
It’s clear by reading this post that Google absolutely does not have the tools — or current knowledge — to evaluate sex on the web. And possibly a lot of other things as well. This is how they do it? Really? They need a community liaison for each of the types of spam they’re expected to deal with, because it’s crystal clear they are in the dark.
Over at Threadwatch.org, Mr. Turner writes:
To understand why the results are poor in adult, you have to understand how adult sites work. You essentially have under 1% of the sites that actually sell something, and over 99% of the sites pushing traffic to those sites as affiliates. There is very little middle ground here. You have very few sites that put up porn for the fun of it. It’s essentially like taking a mainstream industry and dropping every site in it that doesn’t sell something or is an affiliate for someone.
So what that leaves is a group of webmasters all fighting for the same dollar. No one is giving up links to other affiliate sites because they feel it is beneficial to their user. No one is linking to adult sites just for the hell of it as well. The primary way of getting links has been through trades. While this was fine and dandy in the past, as Google’s algorithm advanced to spot link schemes, adult has been sacrificed because of it. Since most sites have relied on reciprocal link trading and since the industry lacks any natural linking because of its nature, it simply doesn’t work in an algorithm geared toward mainstream sites.
So what you’re seeing is sites that were popular in the past become untrusted, which in turn flourishes to new sites that receive links from them. A lack of “trusted” and “authority” sites has made it difficult for new sites to flourish as well.
To me, it’s not about Google blocking out adult content. Heck, a good percent of their searches are adult oriented and there are certainly better ways to block out that content than this. I think it’s just a case of adult having a completely different structure than most mainstream industries.
**I’d also like to add that it looks like they have been targeting blogs of late in Google. Not older established blogs, but new ones that generate feeds, trade links with other blogs, and never obtain links from good neighborhoods. I think the fact that sex blogs don’t rank as well also has to do with the fact that newer and smaller blogs are having a much more difficult time than before.
In a comment at Matt Cutts blog I wrote:
Last week when I needed some rubber tipped flu-flu arrows, I had no trouble using Google to find what I needed, compare products and prices, and make a purchase. But then you don’t see a lot of archery spam, do you?…are sex-related searches important enough in the grand scheme Google and the internet as whole to warrent an ombudsmen devoted having a person or even small department devoted to making sure sex related search results as relevent, useful, and informative as archery querries?
I don’t really encounter that much porn related spam in my websearching because for the most part, I already know where to look and how to look. So I have been mulling over this notion of good neighborhoods, trusted sites, and the rest with fresh eyes, and I spent sometime this morning trying to imagine I was someone who was trying to use Google to find sexual information and entertainment, but who hadn’t spent the last 15 years of his life learning where and how to find the good stuff. In this case, we’ll assume that the searcher in question has an interest in women’s sexual pleasure that is similar to mine. Some Google searches:
videos showing real female pleasure
videos showing authentic female orgasms
real female exhibitionist videos
And just one for TMI
hardcore pictures of redheads with freckles
I wouldn’t go as far as saying the above results are useless, but then I’m looking at them as someone whose journey began nearly 20 years ago when I sent Xandria five bucks for their catalog (which turned out to be same flesh-colored rubber dildos as everywhere else, but with inoffensive names and illustrated with demure line drawings.)
Now some archery searches:
Notice a difference? I sure do, and I don’t think it’s all Google’s fault.
While I do think the name-search thing was a grade-a fuckup, I think it’s a ligitimate question to ask how much effort Google (or anyone else) should put into figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to online sex.
The sex industry is mostly shabby, and nowhere is the shabbiness to sexy ratio higher than online. Even if porn is a $52 billion/year business (a highly dubious figure,) it’s still not as big as the recreational fishing industry. How much time do you think Google spends worrying about fishing spam?
That doesn’t mean I’m letting Google off the hook. (Robots don’t groan at puns!) Google’s business is Relevency, and no matter how you slice it, beastiality and anal rape sites should never rank ahead of Comstock Films when someone searchs ‘couples porn’.
Meanwhile, it’s is a good reminder that what we do, or what Violet does, what Njoy does or what Chelsea Girl does, we do against an overwhelming tide of badness and indiffernce (Doubt it? take a look at the Digg comments when the story broke.) Safely ensconsed in our community of like-minded people, it’s easy to think that the diffence between Comstock Films and a TGP link farm is as self-evident as the diffence between an Njoy buttplug and a jelly rubber buttplug.
It’s not. Not to everyone. Not yet!
