How Much Porn (Pornography) in Google and Microsoft?

Do you ever wonder just how much adult porn, pornography, illegal incest, sexually explicit materials and sexual contents have been indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft spiders or crawlers, and been returned as the search results? According to a recent U.S. government-commissioned study, about one percent (1%) of websites covered by Google and Microsoft’s MSN Internet search indexes contain sexually explicit material. Considering that Google alone claims to have index size of over 25 billion web pages, the adult contents on the Net are massive.

The finding was reported by Associated Press (dead link) after the Government Justice Department lawyers presented the study in court this month as the attempt to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which hope to protect kids by requiring commercial web sites to collect a credit card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view sexual or those potentially harmful to minors material. The study said that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN are adult contents in nature. Beside, about 6 percent of web searches return at least one sexually explicit Web site, and the most popular queries such as Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Jenna Jameson, Ty Olsson, Britney Spear, Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra, Beyonce, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Pussycat Dolls, girls, bikini and etc return a porn site nearly 40 percent of the time.

The study of random websites based on information the Justice Department obtained through subpoenas sent to search engine companies and Internet service providers conducted by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley also revealed that AOL Mature Teen, the strictest content filter tested, AOL’s Mature Teen, blocked 91 percent of the sexually explicit Web sites in indexes maintained by Google Inc. and Microsoft’s MSN, while less restrictive software filters blocked at least 40 percent of indecency sites.