Experts: Pervasiveness of Online Porn Eliminates Need for 'Searches'
by Ed Thomas
November 9, 2004
(AgapePress) - A new book cites the results of a seven-year study on Internet searches. One of the conclusions in the book is that sex and pornography searches have dropped from 20 percent to 5 percent of the yearly totally since 1997. But one computer expert who is familiar with Internet dangers is warning that online porn is not going away.David Burt works Secure Computing, a company that includes an Internet filter among its services and products. His company's database comprises millions of blockable web addresses in over 60 categories. He attempts to give individuals an idea of the pervasiveness of Internet pornography.
"We have tracked over 300 million pages of pornography that are freely available on the Internet the last time we looked, which was in July of 2004," he says. Burt says with thousands of porn sites being created daily, his company has plenty of work providing schools and libraries with updated filtering software and Internet firewalls.
Simply put, online porn is so easy to find that web surfers do not have to conduct extensive searches to find it. Burt says the study results in the new book Web Search: Public Searching of the Web should not be substituted for a study on how many people actually access porn regularly -- especially since technology advances in the last seven years mean searches are not always needed.
A former federal attorney who has helped legally prosecute porn peddlers agrees. "People don't have to search so much for it, it's so commonly available," says Pat Trueman, now with the Family Research Council. "And most [people who are] inclined to get it have it on their 'favorites' site already."
As Trueman explains, there are various ways that Internet users can now get indirect or direct links to pornography -- saving a site as a "favorite" after an initial visit, peer-to-peer connections, instant messaging, and news groups. He says make no mistake: pornography, as well as its related sex crimes and immoral behavior, are all still on the rise.
