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.