‘The Internet is for porn,’ or so goes a song in a recent Broadway play. Here is an interesting news 
item from the Washington Post:
What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
By Matt Richtel, June 24, 2008
Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?
Considering the accessibility of online pornography, how should communities shape local obscenity standards in the digital age?
That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.
The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm…
“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added.”
Strangelove Challenge:
Use Google Trends to find a pattern in search terms. Here is a pattern I found which suggests a seasonal trend in the mass mind regarding ‘capitalism’ — why the big dip at Christmas and shallowing out at Summer each year?:
