Mobile Searches Mostly for Porn, Google Study Says

MONTREAL — Google on Wednesday will release a new study that concludes that Google Internet search requests through cellphones are mostly to find porn.

Those requests, the Mountain View, Calif., search engine said, are at a rate twice what Google encounters from conventional Internet users.

Nearly one in five of Google mobile searches are for words associated with adult entertainment, according to a study to be presented at the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal.

In the study, researchers cite how the percentages of porn searches was once just as high for the conventional Internet but have decreased steadily as the medium matured.

“At present we may simply be observing the types of queries that are flavored in the early stages of adoption of new technology mediums,” researchers said in the report.

Google researchers said porn represented a higher percentage of inquiries than the general interest entertainment, telecom, local services and games, which rounds out the five top Google wireless search topics.

The Google study also contains several other interesting findings: the number of characters and words used in a typical Google cellphone search query is nearly the same as those done from personal computers or personal digital assistants and that it takes about one minute, on average, to enter a search term and get results.

Google researchers will further discuss their findings at CHI, which focuses on human-computer interaction.

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