From this morning’s NY Post, pretty incredible development

FRFRIEND SITES BEAT PORN

By BELINDA GOLDSMITH, Reuters

Posted: 3:55 am
September 17, 2008

Social-networking sites have become even hotter than pornography in cyberspace, a new study shows.

Internet researcher Bill Tancer analyzed information for more than 10 million Web visitors and concluded that “young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago.

The top Internet searches now are on sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

“As social-networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, adding that 18- to 24-year-olds particularly are searching less for porn.

Tancer, the author of “Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters,” said analyzing Web searches gives a wider picture of society and people’s behavior.

Another finding is that in politics, people are still more interested in image than in substance.

“A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image-based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is,” he said.

“You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue.”

There were more searches, he said, for pictures of GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin than for her policies.

Some of his other findings are that celebrity Web sites keep gaining in popularity - they get more clicks than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined.

Tancer, a general manager at the Australian Internet research company Hitwise, said the speed at which information spread on the Web had meant in many cases average people are coming up with “hot stories” that get widespread publicity even though they’re never fact-checked.

“With the explosion of this type of false information on the Internet, I think we will see someone come forward and develop a new type of software that can filter for the most accurate information,” he said.

“Maybe accuracy is the next thing we will all search for.”