Today, Online Opinion posted an article by Abigail Bray, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Western Australia, which is summed up perfectly by Geordie Guy on Somebody Think of the Children:
She writes how a ‘couple of weeks ago’, which I’ll presume is some sort of modern parlance for the ‘in a reproducible experiment performed under controlled conditions’ we expect from academics who submit articles for publication, she went looking for pornography. Astoundingly she found it.
Naturally, people flocked to reproduce Abigail Bray’s experiment of searching Google for ‘sex’. What was surprising was that the results varied significantly for different people. So, I tried myself, and I found that the results were very different when searching Google for ‘sex’:
… than they were when searching Google Australia for ‘sex’ on Australian sites:
Both searches were performed with the default settings: SafeSearch set to medium, logged out of any Google account, and with no cookies. Your results may vary depending on your settings (and your location).
Of course, you would expect Google results to vary when searching different countries. But I hadn’t expected such a large degree of variation. I had assumed that sex was a universal topic.
Update: Made corrections in response to comments by Alan J Lee, Omegatron, and Jim Stewart below. In particular, I had forgotten to mention that I constrained the search on Google Australia to Australian sites.
Here are my results searching Google Australia for ’sex’ without limiting the search to Australian sites:
And I had forgotten (somehow) that hosting pornography in Australia is at least impractical, as ACMA can issue a take-down notice that requires the host to remove such content by 6:00 pm the next business day or face $11,000 per day fines.
So, it’s not at all surprising that far fewer pornographic sites would come up when searching only Australian sites.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
The ‘pages from Australia’ radio button is not ticked by default… which of course does that when it is ticked — presents pages from Australia. If I goto http://www.google.com.au and using the default which is ‘the web’ I get the same results (expect, the wikipedia page is 2nd).
As mentioned above, the test is flawed as the results you’re looking at are “Only australian sites” which means any thing without a .au on the end is filtered out.
I have a bit of exp in this area :) Your results will depend on most of the things you listed above but also on locality. Not only will results vary depending on your phrase, (long tail phrases will not vary as much) but also on your locality. The more relevant & closest results will be returned 1st. Locality is based on IP and to some extent local settings. How Google decides relevancy is a whole other story. Results will vary less when there is less global competition for the phrase.
@Alan J Lee, @Omegatron: You’re right, and I forgot to mention this in the description. The point was to compare the types of US (or worldwide) sites that come up for the query against the types of Australian sites that come up for the query (not to imply that Google Australia was censoring its results, etc).
But I had also forgotten that hosting pornography in Australia is at least impractical, as ACMA can issue a take-down notice that requires the host to remove such content by 6:00 pm the next business day or face $11,000 per day fines.
So, it’s not at all surprising that far fewer pornographic sites would come up when searching only Australian sites.
@Jim Stewart: You’re right. I don’t know whether the main results were affected by my location at all, but the ads picked up that I’m in Adelaide.
Probably a better example would be doing the same query with google.com.au and google.co.nz and maybe even chuck in a few others?
Re porn in Australia… I do know of one site in Australia that is hosted by a national ISP. The same ISP has been in trouble prior for unrelated things. Don’t really want to name them but!
@Omegatron TLDs (.au .nz .com .biz) don’t really come in to it. Our site is a .biz yet we are setup so Google knows we’re an Australian site. You can configure this in Google Webmaster tools yourself.