San Jose Mercury Editorial (friday humor)

[Sheryl Dwinell]

> But the Internet has its dark side: Pornography. A search for ``sex'' in
>the Alta
> Vista search engine retrieves 1,270,540 documents. 
>
> A child using an unrestricted Internet terminal in a public library is only
>a few
> keystrokes away from being exposed to some of the sickest and most graphic
> pornography imaginable. Photographs of bestiality, sadomasochism, and other
> perversions are easily found. Alta Vista records 8,440 matches for
>``bestiality'' and
> 58,620 matches for ``bondage.''

I did my own little Alta Vista search and here are some of the more
wholesome results I got:

school retrieved 6,818,146 documents, family retrieved 4,794,980

and last, but not least:
  
549,650 (baseball) 219,200 (mom) and 5,977 (apple pie)

So, the number of wholesome words on the Net greatly outweighs the number
of nasty words. heh. So what does this prove? Not much more than to show
that keywords by themselves aren't a good indicator of the amount of
goodness or smut on the Net. Shucks, for all we know, several thousand of
those bondage & bestiality hits are for pages generated by our conservative
friends to warn of the evilness of such things.

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu