GOOGLE & PORN: PSST, WANNA SEE SOME DIRTY PICTURES AND UP MY HIT COUNT?

Posted on February 27, 2004 by Dave Pollard
lesbian kissA recent report says that Google, in order to try to beat back growing competition from other search engines (wonder why that might be necessary?), has added a billion pages to what it spiders, from 3.3 to 4.3 billion pages. Most notably, it’s spidering a lot more images — doubling its count to almost a billion. The results are quite bizarre. The Raven, whose wonderful writing ceased a half year ago, has suddenly jumped up in the rankings again, with over two thirds of his 400-some hits per day coming from Google Image searches, virtually all of them clearly in search of porn. The Raven was always discreet and tasteful, but not afraid to lampoon trashy contemporary culture, so his searchers must almost undoubtedly leave disappointed, though slightly better informed.

And Standing Room Only‘s Hugh Elliott, back to his thoughtful and literate blog after a lengthy hiatus, himself laments that his recent surpassing of the 100,000 hit mark was ’empty and meaningless’ and due mainly to people looking for porn. In fact, since the Google ‘upgrade’, one of Hugh’s pictures, posted a year ago, called ‘porn.jpg’ has, all by itself, upped Hugh’s hit count by close to 700 hits per day. And the picture isn’t even pornographic, and it doesn’t even appear on the first results page when you do an Image Search for ‘porn’! Hugh deserves better. Go visit his blog for some fine writing, and especially check out his fiction archives.

All this explains why, although Google has finally got around to spidering about half my old pages since my blog revamp (and you know who I can thank for that), my hit count has only risen by a measly 50 hits/day.

So here’s an experiment, with four points: See the picture above? Tasteful eh? I dedicate it to Presnit Bush’s outrageous new plan to legitimize discrimination in the US Constitution. Guess what I’ve named the picture? The points:

  1. I’ll change the name of the picture to something untitillating in a few days, and track how much of an impact it makes on my daily hit count and ranking. Prepare for one of my snazzy, heart-breaking charts.
  2. We definitely need some better measures of blog popularity than hit counts. Number of inbound links and RSS feed subscriptions are better, but they only tell part of the story. Hey Radio Userland, how about equipping Radio 9.0 users with an automatic hitmeter, that separates out search engine hits from real hits, and shows a trendline?
  3. There’s too many people out there looking for porn, when they should be reading about all the terrible things going on in the world, and how to fix them. And then going looking for porn to take their minds off it. If you came here looking for porn, GET A LIFE, DUDE, and by the way there are way better ways of finding it than using Google. Do some research! And thanks for coming by and upping my hit count. Bye now.
  4. If the picture offends you, ask yourself why.

Oh, and just for good measure: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ already qualifies as the worst movie ever made. Two relentless hours of torture and brutality, violence purely for shock effect, religious revisionism, anti-Semitism, oceans of blood, manipulative sadism, and more whipping and flogging than Caligula. Have I seen it? Of course not. Waste money on the most inevitably bad movie since that equally wacko religious cultist John Travolta made the almost as awful Battlefield Earth, when the competent critics are unanimous that it is ‘loathsome’? I just want to see what mention of this mindless drivel does to my Google count while I’m attracting the uncreative porn-seekers.

Back to my usual serious posts tomorrow.

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19 Responses to GOOGLE & PORN: PSST, WANNA SEE SOME DIRTY PICTURES AND UP MY HIT COUNT?

  1. Darren says:
    February 27, 2004 at 10:06

    That’s a remarkable summary of a film that you haven’t seen, and don’t plan to see. I haven’t seen it either, but I’m certainly not going to pass judgement on it before doing so.Thus far, it’s received a varied response from the critics. Metacritic, an aggregator of critical opinion, currently gives the Passion a 45/100 (http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/passionofthechrist/). Battlefield Earth, by comparison, gets a 7/100 (http://www.metacritic.com/video/titles/battlefieldearth/). Out of a 100. Rotten Tomatoes, another aggregator, gives it 6.5/10 (http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-ftr-passion24.html), while it gives Battlefield Earth a 2.2/10 (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/BattlefieldEarth-1097232/). Unless you know something that the combined opinion of North American critics don’t, I’d say your prognostication is off the mark.

  2. Dave Pollard says:
    February 27, 2004 at 10:22

    I wasn’t being serious, Darren. I am quite sure that once the media frenzy dies down, the bona fide critics will come to their senses and refine their opinions. Every new movie seems to attract superlatives from critics when it first comes out, and if I was a cynic I’d say many of these critics are paid under the table to say something outrageous one way or another — it’s good for business. The four sources I do tend to rely on, though, notably the New Yorker, are unanimous that this film is exploitative and dreadful, and nothing more.

  3. Charles2 says:
    February 27, 2004 at 11:53

    A great analysis of what’s wrong with relying on only raw hits as a measure of blog (or any site) popularity/readership. I’m sure the technical fix is out there somewhere – like most tools on the web, somebody’s got it up and operating on their own site, not realizing what a great thing they’ve got.Ah well… I do like your idea for an experiment.Like most media, there are those that quickly take their use quickly to the lowest level; some of the first widely distributed print works (other than bibles – and I would almost say they fit the description as well) was a type of pornography, TV found it’s way eventually to carrying all manner of porn, video, video games… why wouldn’t the internet follow suit? In fact, unlike the other media, wasn’t the very first truly “massive” use of the web for porn?

  4. Raging Bee says:
    February 27, 2004 at 13:15

    For those of you who, quite understandably, don’t want to give Mel Gibson your money before learning that you’ve just paid for dangerous Jew-bashing crap, and can’t get a refund, here’s a bit of Andrew Sullivan’s take:”Is it anti-Semitic? The question has to be placed in the context of the Gospels and it is hard to reproduce the story without risking such inferences. But in my view, Gibson goes much further than what might be forgivable. The first scene in which Caiphas appears has him relaying to Judas how much money he has agreed to hand over in return for Jesus. The Jew – fussing over money again! There are a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews of Nazi imagery, hissing and plotting and fulminating against the Christ. For good measure, Gibson has the Jewish priestly elite beat Jesus up as well, before they hand him over to the Romans; and he has Jesus telling Pilate that he is not responsible – the Jewish elite is. Pilate and his wife are portrayed as saints forced by politics and the Jewish elders to kill a man they know is innocent.”

  5. Darren says:
    February 27, 2004 at 13:29

    I figured you might be being sarcastic, but wasn’t sure. My bad.On the related question of hits and Web sites–I always pay attention to visitors, not hits. For Webalizer, my stats engine, I think a visitor is a unique IP who visits hits two pages within a half-hour, or something that. I guess that’s my corporate life at work (looking at click-through and the like). Should I be looking at home page hits instead?

  6. Dave Pollard says:
    February 27, 2004 at 13:30

    RB/PTW: Hurrah — we finally agree on something!

  7. hUGH says:
    February 27, 2004 at 14:02

    try calling the photo lesbiankiss.jpg. straight men love that sort of thing. :)(and thanks for the props!)

  8. Rob Paterson says:
    February 28, 2004 at 03:33

    DaveI like it best when you do have some off topic posts. Even Shakespeare added humorous scenes such as the night-watchman in MacBeth (not saying that this post is humor but it is off you main line of posting) My sense is that a leavening of off topic posts will make your great site even more compelling

  9. Susan says:
    February 28, 2004 at 09:49

    Dave is a google slut :)

  10. Steve says:
    February 28, 2004 at 12:31

    Now Susan, you know Dave likes to call it research.

  11. Dr. Omed says:
    February 28, 2004 at 13:13

    Susan, we’re all working the same boulevard. I think I will have to start a collection of Passion reviews by bloggers who haven’t seen the movie. I smell a meme. Speaking of memes, where’s your sweet sixteen, y’all?

  12. Susan says:
    February 28, 2004 at 16:05

    I did some “research” a couple of weeks ago into Janet Jackson’s boob. Spectacularly successful.

  13. Dr. Omed says:
    February 28, 2004 at 16:31

    Righteous Brother Vincent has clued us into the Passion Google Bomb. For the search terms “Passion” or “Passion of the Christ” the desired search result is “Life of Brian.” And vicey versy. Remember, alot of people must participate or the bomb won’t go off. Bombs away!

  14. Rayne says:
    February 28, 2004 at 19:36

    Nuts, Susan beat me to it.Dave, you ignorant Google-slut! ;-)I’m going to start naming every pic I post in the “something-porn.jpg” format. Like this past week’s “febsnow-porn.jpg”. Heh. Wonder what kind of action I’ll catch with that Google-slut bait? Wait’ll they get a load of “kitchen-porn.jpg” or “grasscuttingporn.jpg” or some such…

  15. Dave Pollard says:
    February 28, 2004 at 21:04

    Google hasn’t yet crawled this site, so the benchmark remains the same so far — 800 hits total per day, of which 150 are from text-search engines and almost none are from image-search engines. Incidentally, Rayne, Google image-searchers do get a thumbnail of your pic in the search result window, so you won’t get too many takers for ‘kitchen-porn.jpg’ unless the picture is of a particularly shapely ricer ;-)

  16. David Jones says:
    February 29, 2004 at 15:56

    The fact of two people in love far outweighs the notion of a law against same sex relationships.

  17. m. edmund howse says:
    December 2, 2004 at 09:48

    intellctually, emotionally and erotically stimulating all at the same time. only on the internet while being googled to death.

  18. chuck cane says:
    December 1, 2005 at 14:09

    Its working for me, any hit is a good hit.

  19. Dalston says:
    November 24, 2006 at 22:44

    Funnily enough, that’s the picture I was actually looking for when I found this site. Unfortunately, the resolution is a little too low for me to read the artists name from the photo you have on your site. Would anyone happen to know the name?

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