A new defense tactic in an obscenity case: use the popularity of sexually-explicit search terms in Google to show that actual "community values" are different than what people claim.
Posted by bug to Search at June 25, 2008 9:07 AMI saw this article and the defense seemed completely bogus to me, at least as presented in the article. The problem is that the space of "non obscene" searches is presumably much, much larger than those of "obscene" searches. Of course there will be more searches for "a**l action" than "mom" or "apple pie", even setting aside the fact that internet isn't known for being a great way of getting mom or apple pie to begin with.
Which isn't to say that the search results are irrelevant. I think they are highly relevant to the question at hand (community standards) but that it's really tricky to devise a useful standard for applying them correctly in a case like this. The standard, of course, needs to be determined a priori, not after the data has been mined by the defense attorney.
Posted by: Rawhide at June 25, 2008 9:42 AM