Web Content Survey Results

[GhostShip]

Some of you may remember the Google fight with the government over its order to hand over web searches info, read on..

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/16007733.html

A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Micrsoft's giant Internet indexes showed that only about 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material.
The analysis was presented in a federal court hearing last week in Philadelphia in a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and obtained Monday by the Mercury News.

The ACLU said the analysis, by Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California-Berkeley, did not appear to substantially help the Justice Department in its effort to prove that criminal penalties are necessary to protect minors from exposure to sexually explicit information on the Internet.
The Justice Department had commissioned the study as part of an effort to resurrect the Children's Online Protection Act, which was signed by President Clinton in 1998, but was immediately challenged by the ACLU.

A federal district court in Philadelphia and a federal appeals court banned enforcement of the law. In June 2005, the Supreme Court upheld the ban for constitutional reasons but sent the case back to district court for more fact finding regarding Internet filters.

You can obtain a copy of the report here

http://www.mercextra.com/multimedia/business/report-redact.pdf

Its rather dry reading but I,m sure most people will be be suprised by many of its findings 

[KM]

if the 1% figure wasn't enough to tell you it's flawed, how about their source being search engines that automatically filter most of it

search engines deliberately leave it long periods before they start indexing sites, it is normally 2-3 months before a site is allowed in to the indexes, so they have instantly excluded porn sites that are set up, spammed out to thousands of people by email, then closed after a few months - which is a substantial number

then there is the method of sampling the index for pages, a porn site they might get say 4 pages they can access (home page, some terms and conditions page, a preview page and a join page for example) as the vast majority of it is members only - whereas this site alone has over 22,000 URLs in the google database, so if they had just this site and 5,500 porn sites - they would be telling you from their sample that 50% of the sample was winmxworld and 50% was porn... when really only 1 site out of the 5501 sites (less than 0.02%) was winmxworld

seriously, everyone knows the internet is for porn