Google Buries The Blowjobs
There’s a powerful article by Coleen Singer in Erotic Scribes (which is the house organ for SSSH.com, the erotica-for-women site in Colin Rowntree’s venerable Wasteland.com family of adult websites) that asks the question:
Where Did All The Sex Go On The Internet?
It’s a wide ranging and thoughtful piece about the Pornocalypse that’s well worth your time, but I liked it especially for the snarky analysis of just how destructive and useless Google has become as a search engine for finding porn. Coleen just wanted to find a blowjob movie, and she had to dig through endless major-media fluff and crap all the way to page six of the search results:
Anyone that has ever seen a porn movie knows that there is at least ONE blowjob in it. If the movie has six scenes, there are probably SIX blowjobs in it. So, let’s say I really want to find one of the skinamatic masterpieces just to maybe pick up some new tricks and techniques for my personal use at home.
Step 1: Go to Google.com
Step 2: Make sure any adult content filters are shut off to be able to see “the good stuff”.
Step 3: Type in the search term “Blow Job” and wait 150 milliseconds for all of the wonderful things to choose from.
Here is what comes back, in order of appearance on the front page of search results for “blow job”:
#1: Oral Sex Tips — How to Give a Great Blow Job – Redbook
Redbook? I want to see a blowjob, not how to make curtains or cupcakes!#2: Fellatio — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oh great. A questionably accurate article about the history, socio-economic ramifications and etymology of the blow job. Not exactly toe curling blow job entertainment.#3: Blow Job (film) — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hmmm….. this looks promising. Maybe it might have a link to it to a website with a blowjob movie. Oh wait, the wiki article tells me “Blow Job is a silent film, directed by Andy Warhol, that was filmed in January 1964. It depicts the face of an uncredited DeVeren Bookwalter as he apparently receives fellatio from an unseen partner. While shot at 24 frame/s, Warhol specified that it should be projected at 16 frame/s, slowing it down by a third.” Warhol HAD ME at saying 24 frames per second, but maybe I’ll come back to that one when I’m in a mood for modern film making techniques….#4: Urban Dictionary: Steak and Blowjob Day
I didn’t even bother clicking on that one.#5: Visa Blowjob – YouTube
About as sexy as a YouTube “Cute Kittens On A Piano” home video.#6: Cosmo Master Class: How to Give a Blow Job – Cosmopolitan
Oh great. Is that before or after Cosmo makes me feel like my ass is too fat, or I read about Angelina’s latest adoption of a lucky kid?#7: Blow Jobs Videos — Metacafe
Well, finally soomething that might have a blowjob movie in it! MetaCafe? Sounds kinda like a tube site or something so clicked on it. After patiently waiting a full 30 seconds to be force fed a Playstation advertisement, was rewarded with a iphone video of a couple of people under a blue plastic tarp doing something under there. Not sure what it was. Onward…..#8: Her BJ Hang-Ups — AskMen
Oh great. A men’s magazine blaming all blow job problems with women’s attitudes. Is Pat Robertson on their editorial staff?#9: 7 Killer Blow Job Techinques | Sean Jameson | YourTango
Mind you, I actually am a regular reader of YourTango and enjoy it, but I know for a FACT I am not going to actually SEE a blow job movie on their site.END OF GOOGLE PAGE 1 RESULTS
Sigh… Thwarted at the Google Gate in finding a blow job movie. “Maybe page two” I optimistically said to myself….
Page two DID offer a link to something called OV Guide that promised to at least have a set of reviews of blowjob movies, all on the tubes and probably pirated content, but hey, I was getting desperate so gave it a click. As soon as every possible anti-virus and security warning went off telling me this site was going to steal my identity and soul, I quickly returned to my Google page 2 results.
Page two consisted of a blog posting by some guy remembering that his first blowjob in high school was painful, several dictionary site definitions of the word, an Esquire article about “Eight of ten men surveyed preferred giving than receiving oral sex..” (yeah. right), and some posting on a site called “Family Sex” which sounded too creepy for me to even consider clicking on.
Page 3 of Google results for “Blow Job” offered Gwyneth Paltrow giving advice for women about blowjobs, some more dictionary definitions, a couple of cocktail recipes (I had no idea there was a cocktail called a “blow job” so bookmarked that for later mixology experiments) and FINALLY! ONE LINK to some blow job movies! Some site called xnxx.com that seemed to have LOTS of blow job movies.
Click with eager anticipation….
A Free Porn Tube. With horrible quality movie clips (many possibly pirated) as 3 live sex chat windows spawned in the background, all while a friendly woman in a little chat window offered to please me, and another message told me there were dozens of women in my hometown that want to fuck me (which seems odd, as I live in a rural town with only 1200 residents).
Pages 4 and 5 offered much of the same. Celebrity blow job opinions, drink recipes and a couple more cheesy and probably “illegal in some way” tube links.
It was not until PAGE 6 that I finally found exactly what I was looking for:
The Art of Blowjob: Redhead Camille Crimson’s Blowjobs and … www.theartofblowjob.com/ – Gorgeous redhead Camille Crimson’s passionate and sensual blowjob videos.
I clicked. It was good. Peace was restored to the realm.
As Coleen points out, this is a deliberate choice by Google:
Google knows darned well that a keyword search for “blow job” in NSFW mode is not from someone looking for a cocktail recipe or academic discourse on the matter.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=10344
I Googled ‘blowjob videos’ & the first think to come up was ‘blowjob videos – XNXX.COM.’ So this just proves you have to know how to ask.
Uh, did you actually read the post? The point is that you shouldn’t have to “know how to ask”, because “Google knows darned well that a keyword search for “blow job” in NSFW mode is not from someone looking for a cocktail recipe or academic discourse on the matter.”
And also, did you miss the two paragraphs where the author described why she deemed that site an insufficiently-adequate search result?
I searched for blowjob videos and you are correct, I did receive results. However…what I received was pages and pages of free tube sites with horrible quality movies of questionable origin. What happened to the sites that produce the content. As Coleen mentioned, should we not get results that give us sites like “The Art of Blowjob”, instead of the tube sites that steal their content or worst yet, force the webmasters to submit their movies in order to get their traffic back.
When I search for porn, I don’t want to see 5 pages of wikipedia and 6 pages of irrelevant articles, because Google is trying to think for me or I haven’t asked for it correctly. Really, when I put “porn” into a search engine, it’s because that’s what I really want to see.
Thank you for the kind words about my coverage of google censorship!
I totally resonate with what Victoia said on this.
One further comment is, surfers don’t read much anymore.
As much as bloggers and journalists craft good writings, most surfers only read the headlines and watch the video or view the photo these days. An astounding 80% of all CNN viewers only watch the videos after seeing the 30 character headline. Something blew up! See video.
An equal percentage of porn surfers only read the 6 word title before clicking on the video. “Hot babe takes it in ass”
But did anyone read the synopsis?
A literal army of writers are hand crafting their blog postings at this time for the sole purpose of Google reading it. Nobody else really cares. Siri and Twitter have trained the populace to keep it short.
I fear we have as a society, have fallen down to the lowest level of point and click for instant gratification, leaving writers as search engine “food”. Like Soylent Green”.
End of rant for now…
Coleen, you’re sure right about surfers not reading so much any more.
Some days it feels like a quarter of my comments are by people trying to score ” Ha- ha! Ur rong on teh internetz!” points with arguments that have already been addressed, acknowledged, or refuted in the body of the post or in its linked sources.
I got theartofblowjob.com on Page 2, but then Google knows about me and my surfing habits. Remember that Google Does profile people and not give everyone the same search results. Or perhaps someone at Google read Coleen’s post and decided to tweak their magic formula a bit. Or it was going to be changed anyway, or well, Aliens!
I agree with the first poster you just have to know how to ask. It used to be called library skills. Smart searching should probably be something taught in elementary school if it isn’t already.
I would consider it bad service if google omitted the Wikipedia link and the magazine articles on a generic search like “blow jobs”. And given that all these sites are heavily linked to from the general internet pagerank will always push them to the front. That part is just google trying to do its job, and people more easily linking to non-porn sites (even the most prolific sex blogger will sometimes link to wikipedia, but even a moderately unrestricted non-sex blogger will ever link to a real porn site).
Apart from that, it’s a shame that quality sites are buried beneath the flood of tube sites. And that is indeed a problem with pagerank, and probably the reason why tube sites generally don’t try forcing “meta-tube” sites (tube aggregators?) out of business. These meta sites that don’t host the content themselves but just categorize other sites and provide links (or embedded videos from those sites) of course do improve the pagerank of the linked-to sites.
FWIW, if I google “blowjob art”, the results change quite dramatically.
The way I see it, no amount of carful hand-crafted flavour text is going to save you if your readers don’t know how to connect with you, and if nobody links to you. Misusing Coleens food analogy, I’d say that if people just ask for “food”, they shouldn’t be surprised when “the pleasures of medium-rare tenderloin steak” shows up on result page 6, after pages about soylent green and other people.
Not saying that the pornocalypse isn’t coming, just that this isn’t it.
Endymion, you’re missing (I suspect willfully) that Google used to provide a much better mix of “authority sites” like Wikipedia and the mainstream press with higher-quality porn in its initial search results for common porn terms like “blowjob”. They have deliberately degraded the ability of searchers to find porn readily.
And that’s the very essence of the Pornocalypse.
Bacchus, I’m not saying that search results didn’t deteriorate. I’m just not seeing deliberation behind that.
I’m not trying to whitewash Google: the Pornocalypse already has happened on youtube and g+, and they impressively showed the world how you can influence user search behaviour by adding a seemingly innocuous feature like auto-completion. The search-bubble created by Google trying not to disturb users has the potential to seriously damage political discourse in our society.(*)
That said, I’m pretty certain there is no deliberation behind Google showing non-porn sites first, then tube sites, then quality sites.
Google doesn’t by itself favour non-porn sites, rather it lets the web do this for them. Non-porn sites are linked to by porn and non-porn sites alike, so it should be clear that they “win” a generic search like the one mentioned. As I’ve already written, the tube sites try hard to mimic non-porn sites in the way the are interlinked, so they have some advantage over seldomly linked-to quality sites. This is mostly natural selection between tube sites in action. For a tube site, appearing prominently in generic searches worth investing a lot of resources.
Then we have quality sites. They are also linked to, but not by automatic and specialised aggregator sites. Mostly it’s actual people linking to such sites on their blogs or Tumblrs. These kind of links should generally be favoured by Google page rank, because Google tries to rank deliberate links higher than link-farms. So, in theory, quality sites should often rank higher than tube sites in the results.
In practice, however, and as you prominently reported, the Pornocalypse has happened on Tumblr. All these Tumblr sites that supposedly were pure pagerank-gold, were annihilated as far as Google is concerned. You can’t tell me that doesn’t severely affect placement of quality porn in search results.
I’m sticking with (and refining) my statement: The pornocalypse might be coming to Google, but this is merely fallout from another one.
(*) Fun fact: TIL that safe-search is enabled by default for U.S. users.
Google doesn’t favor non-porn sites, it actively *disfavors* porn sites. I don’t have the links handy but they have acknowledged this publicly. This is not just the natural results of even-handed algorithms; it’s the result of algorithms designed to make porn less visible in the results. The tube sites still showing up is, I think, something Google does not want and will eventually “fix” — but of course that’s speculation on my part.
If you could still find those links, I’d appreciate it. Since I just found out today about safe-search defaults in the U.S., who knows what else I’ve missed.
I’m still incredulous about the sudden *deliberate* disfavouring of quality porn sites compared to tube sites. Especially given the supposed timing related to the Tumblr incident. But I live to learn…
There’s a video here where Google’s Matt Cutts says “I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having general queries be a little more clean, to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including, for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have more impact in those kinds of areas, that are a little more contested by various spammers, and that sort of thing.”
It’s a little bit inarticulate but he’s talking about rolling out changes in the search algorithm (he calls them “two new rules”) designed to make results for these queries harder to find, by ranking them lower and displaying them deeper in the search results. I personally think he’s being untruthful about the motive, but nobody can prove what’s in his mind or the minds of the decision-makers. Still, there can be no dispute that he’s acknowledging porn is returning lower in the search results because of specific decisions that Google has recently made, not because of “natural selection” between sites affected by a content-neutral algorithm.
Thanks for the link.
It’s indeed very vague about what they mean by “spammy” and what they do in detail. With that as a starting point, and reading up on the current generation of Google page ranking algorithms, I’d say that many porn sites will probably be seen as “spammy” by the Google algorithm.
Google gives some hints in its webmaster guidelines[1], specifically in the part about “doorway pages”[2] they give “Templated pages made solely for affiliate linking” as an example. Since those pages are mostly used by (subscription) porn sites, that would at least partly support your observations.
Hmmm… the more I read and think about this, the murkier it gets. I still don’t see real deliberation against porn sites in general (in dubio pro reo). Yet I can see why you would come to a different conclusion based on the same facts.
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311
FWIW: Violet Blue seems to have the same thoughts over at tinynibbles:
> Can I also add that it doesn’t help that Google Search has gone to absolute shit over the past year?
I don’t know if I’m getting the same results as you because I believe Google imposes some country-specific restrictions, but I Googled “blowjob porn” and immediately got a whole page of links to blowjob videos. The magic word “porn” in the query seems to make a difference.