What is the Internets?

A tool invented by Al Gore you say? Well right you are! And do you think the bulk of traffic and usage over the internet is related to Internet commerce? Well, only if your name is Larry Flint. Or at least related to some smut peddler. No, I'm afraid the actual usage is a general reflection on our sad state of affairs.

NorwoodMatt and I were reviewing a recent article by Cecil Adams where he claimed that that porn related material was in fact made a small portion of Internet activity. Well, it was at that time that Norwoodmatt asked that I pass over the toilet paper, and seeing that I was not going to give up the only roll, I passed under the newspaper. But that subject persisted and together, Norwoodmatt and myself devised a way to prove Mr. Adams incorrect.

Now we can't ever begin to address those that know where to get their porn. There is just no way to track this activity. But we can track those in the general internet population that don't have a clue but are darn curious. Cecil claim he used Overture to find out what keywords folks where typing in the search engines. And his research showed that porn made up a small category. Well, I use Word Tracker in the past, and know that that the adult filters are on by default. I was sure that removing the adult filter would show porn staking a larger piece of the pie.

So I signed up for the free weekly keyword surge report and boy was I not disappointed. Now I'm not going to go into all the various names of female body parts that I haven't heard since my time in the Army, but I can still illustrate my point. With the help of Norwoodmatt, we went through the list and assigned categories to all the keywords. Some of the keywords, mostly porn actresses I later found out, were foreign to us. So I volunteer to look them up in google to find out the skinny. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

So after importing 2 weeks of data, we have our first draft view into the shady world of the internet. While we did identify a lot of celebrity and starlet names, they were suspisoiuly tied to porn, as many variations of their names included "nudity" and such. But to keep this scientific data pure, we created different categories to capture these keywords used alone, separate from porn. So here are the sad results:



I was only able to get the first couple of categories to appear on the report. But here is the official break down. I'm too lazy to format it any better, but I'll re-do the list after next weeks import.

KeywordCountSummary

pr0n	299290.00
Starlet	43706.00
on-line reference	42847.00
music	30527.00
games	23473.00
celebrity	18737.00
on-line shopping	16381.00
unknown	14922.00
fat fingered	13737.00
pets	12693.00
literature	11833.00
online tools	10059.00
holiday	9766.00
weather	9352.00
TV	9075.00
biz	8190.00
names	8105.00
seasonal or trend	7543.00
humor	6766.00
web mail	6302.00
dating	5356.00
drugs	5248.00
news	3393.00
religion	2730.00
sports	2099.00
cars	1565.00
online tool	1449.00
donations	1210.00
Rx	1209.00
fashion	1178.00
recreation	1142.00
tech	1131.00
Sci-fi	787.00
Hate Group	525.00