CHAPTER 7:  WEB DIRECTORIES

Related Research

The Internet has irrevocably changed public access to sexually explicit materials.  The term “Sex” has long been the number one term used in search engines, although it now vies with “MP3” for that top spot.  The adult webmastering community knows their customers well, and there are several places where the top words can be located.  Searchwords.com[1] has weekly updates of all Web search words, including an edited list of sex words.  AVN Online, an adult webmasters trade magazine from Adult Video News, publishes the top 25 search words from Naughty Linx,[2] an adult directory and search engine.  In short, there are many interesting methods and discussions arising from the economic sector responsible for providing “pornography” to their customers. 

There have been a number of studies and media reports about “pornography” and the Internet.  These are often in sensational terms of addiction, abuses, and quantity of material available.  In the library field, “pornography” is usually discussed in terms of “censorship,” and in libraries the current hot topic is Web filters, and whether or not a public library should or must install them. 

None of these perspectives are a focus of this study, which is concerned with access to sexually explicit materials and “pornography.”  As we have seen above, some library literature can be found that directly or indirectly discusses access to sexually explicit materials.  Similarly, some information science research not originally produced with “pornography” in mind reveals truths about sexually explicit information seeking that are relevant to this paper.

Excite Survey

A recent study by Jansen, Spink, et. al. examined results of a 1997 survey mounted on the Excite Web portal.  They also examined the server query log, then created a taxonomy and categorized the queries by type of information sought.  They noted that:

[t]here is no way of going around it:  a lot of terms, about 25% of highest used terms, dealt with some or other sexual topic.”[3]

The lead-in of this sentence commenting on (apologizing for?) their findings about sexual topics reveals the omnipresent ambivalence about sexually explicit queries that is repeatedly seen in the discipline of Information Science.

In another analysis of this data, they find statistical ways to discount the findings that searches are for sexual topics are so prevalent.

[N]ot all queries in this category [sex, pornography, preferences] are about pornography; many are about other aspects of sex and sexuality.  Thus, in no way is pornography a major topic of Web queries, even though the top ranked terms may indicate this.  Only one in about 6 Web queries is about sex, and, as mentioned, not even all of those are geared toward pornography.[4]

This observation is only a small portion of the Excite study results, which are very rich and revealing about Web searching behavior in general.  But it points out the significance, the sheer number of sexually explicit queries on the Internet. The demand for sexual information and entertainment among the population of Web users is huge.  This kind of information seeking is, therefore, very relevant to information science studies.

Adult Web Directories

There is a huge variety of Web-based sexually explicit media and terms to describe them.  The range and tone of these terms is different from the thesauri studied, for instance they are much “dirtier,” or perhaps more direct and vernacular.  The arrangement of the terms also is less systematic than constructed thesauri.  Examining sexually explicit terms from an information science perspective of human information behavior is sure to net interesting results.  These terms are already carefully analyzed by the adult webmastering industry, which has a financial need to quickly understand and respond to their customers.  The terms, usually manifested as clickable links, outline the kinds of sexually explicit materials available on the Web, and express them in user-centered terms. 

I chose Google, Yahoo!, and Excite as representative of general Web directories.  They are each owned by different parent companies.  Each shows some significant differences in their approach to sexuality.  I will compare the top-level “Sexuality” headings of several Web directories, then look in detail at the “Activities & Practices,” “BDSM,” and “Fetishes” category.  I was curious about what kinds of terms the directories use, how they are linked to other terms, and how this compares to library subject headings for sexually explicit materials. 

“Sexuality”

The most evident difference is that Excite does not have a “Sexuality” heading.  Topics that relate to sexual activities are dispersed in the “R- and X-Rated” and “Sexual health” links.  Also of interest are the commercial implications, which make links to “Free sites” and “Membership sites” an overriding issue when indexing and looking for sexually explicit materials. 

There are some other cultural forms we have not seen before.  For example, under “Heterosexual pride” is a set of sites that correlates with the political identity associated with “Gay pride.”   A “Purity test,” a kind of a survey about kinds of sexual activities a person has engaged in, leading to a “purity rating,” is a phenomenon (or maybe an elaborate joke) that seems specific to the Internet.  Another term we have not encountered in the thesauri are “Tantric sex” or “Tantra,” which two of the portals have represented in the top level.  These might go under the LC subject heading Sex – Buddhist aspects

“Advice” is represented in all three portals, while Excite and Yahoo! have “STDs” as a top-level category, while Google locates “STDs” as a subcategory of “Men’s health” or “Womens [sic] health.”  Another Internet-only category is “Chat,” which all three directories have links to.

Table 15:  Google, Yahoo!, and Excite on “Sexuality” and “R- and X-Rated.”

“Activities & Practices”

“Activities & Practices” is (alphabetically) the first heading in most Web directories, including Google and Yahoo!. This heading is odd because most of the links in “Sexuality” are about different kinds of sexual activities and practices.  That some practices and not others are specifically called out under this link is of interest.  Google’s has only three links below it: “Infantilism,” “Masturbation,” and “Swinging.”  Although this doesn’t seem to make any sense at all, many other Web portals have the same three links as Google; some add “BDSM” and “Zoophilia.”  The contents of Yahoo!’s “Activities & Practices” link is much more frank, and includes a wide range of special sexual practices. 

Table 16:  Yahoo! and Google on “Activities & Practices”

BDSM

A specialized subcategory is “BDSM,” or “BD/SM/Ds”—“Bondage and Discipline/Sadomasochism” or “Bondage and Discipline/Sadomasochism/Dominance and submission.”  The user needs to know what these acronyms mean in order to navigate the hierarchy, and still the results are very different across portals. 

Excite is slim and seemingly random in its differentiation of the many manifestations of this sexual practice.  Although not uniform, the tendency is for Google categories relate to the format of the links (Chat and discussion, Essays and fiction), while the Yahoo! categories refer more often to the kinds of practices depicted in the indexed websites (Flogging, Sounds). 

Table 17:  Google, Yahoo!, and Excite on “BDSM” and “BD/SM/Ds.”

Fetishes

Finally, the links of the “Fetishes” subheading are also not clear-cut.  For instance, Google’s “Fetish” category was not very rich, but in a different area, their “Image galleries > Fetishes” links included many of the same terms as Yahoo! and Excite.  These links carefully differentiate in user-centered terms the types of fetish material available on the Internet.  They divide generally into type of sexual activity depicted or discussed (Smoking, Tickling); type of person depicted (Nurses, Cheerleaders); or the body part emphasized (Feet, Butts). 

Table 18:  Google, Yahoo! and Excite on “Fetishes.”

This analysis illustrates several significant things.  One is the hesitance of Librarians and Information Scientists to look directly at this important part of Internet searching.  The other is the empirical way that adult webmasters approach the pornography-seeking behavior of their potential customers. 

Web directories such as Excite, Yahoo! and Google are using the literary warrant of the Web to create their directories.  These directories are talking about the variety of sexually explicit materials and “pornography” as it exists on the Web.  As such, the manner of description has more candor and less attention to scientific decorum than the library-based Thesauri.  Is this discursive practice, this sociotechnical work, really talking about the same things as are held in libraries?  How is it that these words are so different?  What kind of work do these different kinds of terms do?

Some of these differences arise from a different theory of the user, and the circumstances of use.  The users are thought to be looking for entertainment, for dirty pictures, for “pornography.” The providers of th