Hello Tony,

We recommend you use specific keywords that are relevant to your targeted audience. Well-targeted keywords can help you reach your intended audience and maintain the relevance of Google search results and advertisements for our users. To edit your keyword list, please follow the steps listed at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6271&hl=en_US.[emphasis mine]

In addition, Google doesn’t permit ads labeled ‘Non-Family Safe’ or ‘Adult’ to appear to users who have activated their Safe-Search filter. Please make sure your Safe-Search filter isn’t activated, and try searching Google again. To check your Safe-Search filter preference, follow the steps listed at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=40905&hl=en_US.

Ram Balasubramania
The Google AdWords Team

Okay, fair enough.

While it’s true that some of the top top returns for ‘romantica’ are concerned with cock-sucking, butt-fucking, ass-eating, and orgies (all in the context of a loving, man/woman, monogamous relationship, you understand,) but if you keep clicking, you’ll find a lot of returns for hotels, lingerie, bridalwear; which are all things that go quite nicely with cock-sucking, butt-fucking, ass-eating, and orgies, but not in and of themselves sexually explicit.

Now the strange part.

As of 7:44AM, Google’s Adwords is showing our ad as active on the search ‘romantica.’

Squeaky wheel gets the grease? Algorithym refinement? Lots of Ellora’s Cave fans inside the High House of Search? I don’t care. Comstock Films is a by hook or by crook operation!

Update 12:53PM

We’re back where we started. No advertising for Comstock Films on the keyword ‘romantica’. The googlebot is fickle!

This morning I decided I didn’t know enough about this whole Adword thing, so I decided would by one of Google’s Adwords, and the word I choose was romantica

For those of you who don’t already know, romantica is a sub-genre of romance that places a heavy emphasis on sex and arrousing the reader. My friend Lauren Dane calls herself a romantica author. This is what Ellora’s Cave has to say about it:

Romantica® is the name for the line of erotic romance novels published by Ellora’s Cave Publishing. Erotic romance is defined by us as: any work of literature that is both romantic and sexually explicit in nature. Within this genre, a man and a woman develop “in love” feelings for one another that culminate in a monogamous relationship.*

Romantica® doesn’t begin from the premise that women’s sexual experiences are dirty and therefore in need of being perfumed up by flowery phrases. The premise of Romantica™ is that women’s sexual experiences are legitimate, positive, and beautiful.

(*I’m not quite sure how the man/woman/monogamy part works with EC’s Gay & Lesbian themed titles or their Menage a Trios or More themed titles.)

Romantica is popular with women, and does a huge trade in e-books. E-books are a handy way to buy and read your smut because e-book readers are secure and portable. You can keep in e-book reader in your purse, and just to make sure your kids or husband doesn’t get nosey, you can password protect it. And a good thing too. Romantica books get pretty saucy. Here’s Ellora’s Cave’s (the best known and largest publisher of romantica) trademarked SEX rating system:

S – ENSUOUS
E – ROTIC
X - TREME

X-treme titles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storyline execution. Stories designated with the letter X tend to contain difficult or controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.

Romantica authors and publishers don’t consider what they do porn, but whatever you call it, some of it is pretty damn saucy. Inside the genre there are threesomes, foursomes, orgies, BDSM, ambiguous consentuality, and every manner of penetration you can imagine. These books are about sex, but the reason that (most of) the people who read them, write them, and publish them don’t consider romantica to be porn is because romantic places an emphasis on character, chemistry, and craft that just doesn’t come to mind when most people think of porn.

I’m none to fond of the p word either, for most of the same reason. But whatever you call our work, by Ellora’s rating system, I’d say that our films are an S; Our sex scenes leave nothing to the imagination, but they’re pretty vanilla as far as actual sex acts. I’d guess that some the of people who like getting turned on reading romantica might enjoy getting turned on watching one of our films. And that’s what makes the reason that Google won’t let me buy the key word “romantica” positively absurd. Here’s what google says:

Reason:
An Adult classification is preventing your ad from showing.

What can I do?
If your AdWords ad is classified as Adult, modifying the content of your site or your ad text may make your ad eligible for consideration as a Non-Family Safe ad. However, both of these classifications were created to protect users who do not wish to see material intended for adult audiences. To ensure that we provide a positive user experience, we do not permit the advertisement of adult sites for unrelated, Family Safe keywords. Click here for more information about our ad approval policies. Alternatively, you can edit your keyword list to reflect the adult content of your ad.

I don’t know if Google “AdWords Specialists” are pizzaboxes or people, but either way, if Google thinks ‘romantica’ isn’t an “adult search querry”, then something’s wrong with Google. (In case you’re wondering, Ellora’s Cave is the #2 search result for ‘romantica’.)

It’s looking more and more like Violet is right. Whether or not the “Adword Specialists” are pizzaboxes or people, Google does not have the tools – or current knowledge – to evaluate sex on the web.

P.S. I sent Google a note using their form. (I hate formmail because I don’t get to keep a copy.) I told them they were wrong, that ‘romantica’ was not a family friendly search. I copied Ellora’s Cave’s rating system into it. We’ll see what happens.

P.P.S. Here’s another rating system from another first page return for the google search ‘romantica’:

STORY RATING
1- Don’t waste your money.
1 If you have it, it’s worth the read but goes back to the ubs.
2 Good story, but probably goes to the ubs.
3 I like everything this author writes, but they’ve done better.
4 This is a keeper.
4+ Rare find, must find everything this author has written.
5 THERE ARE NO WORDS FOR THIS BOOK!!!!!

SEX/LOVE SCENE RATING
Limp=> Bad, little or NO SEX AT ALL!
Erect==> Good sex toward the end.
Boner===> Good sex half-way through and thereafter.
STIFF====> Good sexual tension throughout the book, and when it happens, you feel you’ve been there already.
HUGH=====> GREAT SEX in the first 1/4 of book and throughout the book.

I’m probably late to the party on this (busy making sex films, y’know) but I had a thought: Is the priority that Google places on link quality (and the resulting rankings and revenues) an example of an effort to monetize social capital in action?

Conversely, is the social capital that Comstock Films enjoys in its little corner of the internet devalued by the larger company it keeps? Our outbound links are all either: a) People who have said nice things about us and our work, or b) People, places, or things we think are nifty. Isn’t that what the googlebot likes? Shouldn’t ComstockFilms.com be a “clean and trusted” site? (Sound sort of like talking about VD in the Forties, doesn’ it?)

I used to think we were “clean and trusted”, but in light of my recent sex-related searches, I’m not so sure. Maybe we’re bad company.Does our linking to Tramp Lamps help them or hurt them?

In fact, just now I’ve just revisited them and see they’ve added this bit on their link page, “Thanks for stopping by our little web site. If you would like to link up, and your content would not embarrass my mother, contact us about an exchange.”

Would Momma Tramp Lamp be embarrassed by Comstock Films? Hard to know, isn’t it?

P.S. Maybe this why Andrew Sullivan didn’t link to me when he quoted me. Maybe he’s afraid his clean and trusted blog might catch whatever I have. Is there such a thing as Valtrex for blogs? Blogtrex?

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.

**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

is female ejaculation real

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:

flu flu arrows

archery supplies

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!

In an e-mail to Matt Cutts, I wrote:

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.

Right now Peggy and I are re-jiggering page titles and writing meta-tags. In other words, we’re writing for robots, and it’s the most hateful writing assignment I’ve ever had.

If what I’ve learned from Matt and Danny and others is correct, robots are decidedly unimpresses by nearly every aspect of language I adore. Robots don’t care about alliteration, simile or metaphor. Robots don’t subvocalize when they read.

Robots don’t cringe at puns. Robots can’t appreciate a well turned phrase. Robots might write poetry, but they don’t read it. They don’t appreciate music, and they don’t appreciate the musicality of words lined up just so.

I am writing for robots, and I hate it.

Thank God I don’t have to make movies for them.

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.)

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.