Study: Web surfers seek business, travel sites more than adult sites

By

Posted 8:31AM on Monday, April 1, 2002

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - People using Internet search engines are less interested in sex sites and more interested in business, travel and jobs than they were five years ago, according to a study led by a Penn State University researcher. In May 1997, 16.8 percent of searches on the Excite search engine were for sex-related or pornographic Web sites. By May 2001, that percentage had dropped almost in half to 8.5 percent, according to an article in the March edition of IEEE Computer, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. During the same period, searches related to commerce, travel, employment and the economy rose from 13.3 percent in 1997 to 24.7 percent in 2001. But a researcher not involved in the study said the ever-changing patterns of Internet usage makes it hard to interpret much from the data. John Morrison, a researcher and instructor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., agreed with researchers that demographic changes in Internet users have played a role in the decline. But, he also said that people looking for pornography today are more likely to go to newsgroups than to a search engine. Amanda Spink, associate professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State and the lead author of the study, said the nature of the Internet and in its users are changing. "The content of the Web from 1997 has shifted heavily toward commerce sites," Spink said. "Also, the nature of people who search the Web has changed. In '97, you probably had a higher proportion of university people, of young guys who knew about computers. Now you have more the average person, and the average person may not be as interested in sex and pornography." Morrison, however, said the proliferation of search engines over the study period -- only a handful existed in 1997, compared to more than 3,500 now -- complicates the data. "Instead of going to one place, Excite, for everything, people are spreading out, becoming more intelligent, and using certain search engines for certain things and certain search engines for something else," Morrison said. "The nature of the search engines, themselves, has changed, so it's hard to do any research." Despite the drop indicated in the study, researchers found online interest in sex remains strong. Searches for sex and pornography sites outnumbered those for education, government and the fine arts combined. And despite the relative decrease compared to business sites, the overall growth of the Internet means there probably were more total searches for sex sites in the 2001 data. The study also indicates that people who use search engines are spending less time on them, with more than half going no further than the first set of 20 search results. Spink said improvements in search engines have sometimes made it unnecessary to go past the first set of results. But she also questions whether people new to the Internet are prepared for the volume of information a simple search can return. Spink was joined by Bernard J. Jansen, of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle; Dietmar Wolfram, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and Tefko Saracevic, of Rutgers University. ------ On the Net: Excite: http://www.excite.com/ Penn State University: http://www.psu.edu Rollins College: http://www.rollins.edu/