Porn Filters Taking the Ogle out of Google
 

Late last night Rand emailed me this article about the concerns over Google filtering "good porn" out of their search results. I think it's funny how Google has been, as Danny Sullivan put it, "tweaking porn filters" when their image search results frequently return some serious (and often nas-tay) T&A. Seriously, do a search for stuff like "junk in the trunk," "sex," "brunette," or "blonde," and you'll see a huge disparity in the listed and image results (with "safe search" disabled in both). Bleh. If Google's trying to serve up relevant results that are light on the porn, then they've got a lot of work to do with their image search results. (Uh, by the way, don't do the searches at work if you're in an office that, unlike SEOmoz, doesn't condone gawking at porn.)

Anyway, back to the article. I found this piece to be unintentionally amusing. It talks about the "difficulties of gauging 'good porn,'" which is pretty hilarious. Is there such a thing as "good" vs. "bad" porn? Wouldn't that depend on the searcher's taste? Someone who's into S&M might find bondage porn results to be "good porn," right?

It seems that "good porn" is supposed to be "spam-lite," relevant porn, but the article talks about how erotic and adult industry blogs had been disappearing from search results. Hey Google, where's the porn love? Are you just one big fat prude?

Whole article HERE -> http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1633

There's definitely lots happening at Google the last month, they just pushed out a PR update, and rankings have been all over the place. Spammers are still doing well, and lots of the people who did well for 4-5 years are in the dark at the moment. It's going to be rough going this year I think, but it looks like they're looking at it regularly and trying to tweak things over there.

Google is (IMHO) very wisely working to keep search terms that have a double meaning as clean as possible. I don't think of it as a direct attack on porn per se, but rather a pre-emptive move to keep terms likely to be typed by minors and US Senators clean.

Their image search deal needs a good cleaning, but it is way harder to filter out offensive images than it is to filter word combinations.

The general public will vote. If they cannot find porn on google, they will go elsewhere to search, and google will suffer (can anyone say "excite"?).

Although I'm not talking just about images here, Google seems to handle mainstream and adult very differently in my experience. Have one of each type of site that get most of my attention. They were SEO'd the same way, and they're both about the same age... 3 years. And, they're both in very competitive areas of the Net. But, everything I do for my mainstream site shows up faster in Google, and has more positive effects on improving my rankings. Whereas, changes and additions to my adult site are not noted by Google nearly as fast, or in some cases, not at all. Always wondered whether it was just my experience, or other people witnessed the same between mainstream and adult on Google.