Do People Seriously Use Google to Find Porn?

Europeans, who seem to find many of the American idiosyncrasies when it comes to issues about pornography downright antediluvian, can tune out right now unless they'd like a giggle, or to weigh in on how silly Americans can be about things like naked adults.

Here in the States, it's fairly amazing that adult films do such incredible business, considering that few people will admit to ever watching them. There is a booming business that's done under cover of online purchases, black-plastic-wrapped mailings, and anonymity. But Florida, so often the state that makes headlines, is at it again with a trial currently underway over materials that Ray Guhn posted on his web site. The determining factor for declaring the materials obscene? The "contemporary community standards" test, whereby something that's not a problem in one community may be considered obscene in another.

The defense has decided to use Google Trends to prove that what a community says in public isn't what they are clicking on with the shades drawn. While contemporary community standards are often described as "I'll know it when I see it," John Murrell at Good Morning Silicon Valley relabels it for the Web 2.0 era: "Obscenity? I know it when I see it Googled."

Of course, some people online are using this as another example of how our Google searches are being preserved and sorted and compiled in all sorts of ways, even to use in defending an accused pervert. And I've mentioned before that many of us search without ever thinking about our search terms and the picture they paint of us.

Mostly, however, I was amazed that the defense is using Google, of all things, to determine the amount of porn that Pensacola (the closest city they have data for) consumes. How quaint! The judge and jury may or not be swayed by the defense's arguments, but if I were a consultant for the defense, I'd point out that they are going about it all wrong. The search data is just a tiny tip of the iceberg for what the true community standards are.

The prosecution will argue that the number of searches is impossible to reconcile, since one individual may complete hundreds of searches on a topic. What they will fail to take into account, however, is that only the most amateur of porn aficionados will search for their favorite form of online entertainment through a pedestrian site like Google, much less do it through their own IP address. The savvy and experienced connoisseurs will be using anonymizers, sending their searches through a string of servers until they end up in some other country. They also won't use Google to search, relying on known link sites to find what they are looking for, or returning to favorites without even needing to search.

Looking beyond the missing data, however, is the idea that a web site exists in a given community. A web site exists in the larger global community. U.S. residents get up in arms when a country with stricter guidelines of obscenity calls for content removal or blocks a site, but we'll allow community standards to define obscenity depending on the local town ordinances.

U.S. laws (and I would assume many other countries as well) are too far behind the global community that the Internet has created. Both prosecution and defense are relying on outdated methods of determining how people should go about their business. And until the courts catch up with the Web, we'll see more cases based on these assumptions.