Googling for sex

  • Posted by RSA
  • August 2, 2006

Googling around, I made a discovery, based on the following experiment:

Google for your last name and the word “sex”. Answer these questions:

  1. How unexpected was the first hit? Mine — very. A sexual predator site.
  2. Does a hit that’s unambiguously you occur within the top 50? I make it at #50 exactly, thanks to an paper I published at a statistical workshop in which another author wrote about an experiment that involved both men and women.
  3. Does a hit to a personal ad or pornography site occur within the top 50? Surprisingly to me, given the vast amounts of porn on the Web, this did not happen.

What do you get? I should say that if your last name is not unusual or happens to be the same as that of a porn star, you’re not likely to find yourself.

Information and Links

Join the fray by commenting, tracking what others have to say, or linking to it from your blog.

Information
August 2nd, 2006
7 Responses
Feeds and Links
Comment Feed
From This Author
Del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Categories
Fun

Other Posts
Exercising the body
What’s getting better in Kansas?

Write a Comment

Take a moment to comment and tell us what you think. Some basic HTML is allowed for formatting.

Reader Comments

Comment Number:
1
Written by:
dave
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 1:13 pm

Ha…I showed up number one.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
dave
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 1:13 pm

Oh…and no porn.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
smijer
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 1:23 pm

It isn’t going to find me…. with my last name, this experiment is useless. Somewhat more interesting results if I included my only slightly less common first name. It still didn’t find me, or any porn… but apparently I’m involved in the plot of a particular sex & the city episode - that was the majority of the results, including the first hit. I once just googled my name; nothing else… Some of my conymists (I just made that word up) have interesting careers. Several academics. I don’t know how I got left out.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
RSA
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Dave, you’re a clean-living, well-regarded man. Smijer, I like your Latin stylings.

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
dave
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 2:14 pm

Dave, you’re a clean-living, well-regarded man.

Ha…you obviously did not look at some of the links it found. Maybe not porn, but legal cases were to be found! :)

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Buck
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 2:47 pm

Not surprisingly my first hit included sex and a lawsuit.

No porn that I could find.

For me, sex is always ambiguous.

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
PZ Myers
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 at 7:23 pm

1. Fort Myers party
2. #14, 44, and 46
3. No.