The number of people using the internet to search for sex and pornographic material is on the decline, a study has found. A book by University of Pittsburgh and Penn State researchers says that internet users are doing far fewer sex searches than they were seven years ago. More and more users are logging on to search engines for e-commerce.
'Twenty per cent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997, now it's about 5 per cent,' according to the book, co-authored by Amanda Spink, a University of Pittsburgh professor and Penn State professor Bernard J Jansen.
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web further states that people are using the internet more as an everyday tool rather than as just an entertainment medium.
The results are not surprising, say the experts.
Spink said her studies show queries for e-business or commerce increased by 86 per cent in the past seven years. Gary Price, news editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, observes that e-commerce has boomed in the last seven years, making shopping and gathering information more routine on the web and the number of users who see the internet just as an easy source of porn material is declining.
Spink and Jansen randomly selected thousands of search sessions from more than 1 million they culled anonymously from search engines such as AltaVista. They tracked the type of search terms used, how many search terms were entered and how deeply into the results computer users clicked for information.
However, what has remained the same is searching patterns of users. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.
"The searches are taking less than five minutes and they're only looking at the first page of results," Spink said. "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page" of search engine results.
Next, Spink and Jansen plan to train their lens on the Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo.com, dubbed as the challenger to google.com's supremacy in the search domain. The findings will go to improve the "metasearch" engine.
External Link: Amanda Spink's new book
