Two years ago, PC Mag tech columnist John Dvorak wrote a piece entitled "Free porn", to prove that merely including those words in an article would massively increase the traffic for that piece -- since pornhounds regularly search for that phrase and will click on anything that seems to point to that promised land. Apparently, it worked. Two years later, that column has remained on the most-read list of articles at PC Mag's site. As Dvorak notes:

Just the use of the word is enough to pump up the numbers. Are online readers so drawn to porn that they aggressively seek it out? No wonder the amount of pornographic e-mail come-ons has been slipping. Why bother with spam? Just set up a porn site and the readers will seek you out.

I can only assume that in the USA in particular there is some sort of pent-up demand for porn. I think this is because we make such a fuss over it, as if it's so horribly dangerous. Even the suggestion of nudity, as in that ad for Monday Night Football with Terrell Owens and Nicollet Sheridan, turns out to be scandalous, as seen by the reactions to it from the NFL and the Federal Communications Commission. And there are all these objections to how online people flock to porn! Does anyone find this odd and disturbing?

I've noticed this phenomenon myself. Not long after I launched this blog in the fall of 2002, I crunched my site-visitor statistics and noticed that a huge amount of people were arriving at my site because they'd searched for "upskirting" on Google or Yahoo -- and found me. Why? Because I'd blogged about people using mobile phones for upskirting and, given the amount of Google juice I've got, I was displaying as a high result. I just checked this again on Google and, sure enough, I'm still the number two and three result for "upskirting".

Now that I've combined the magic words "free porn" with "upskirting", I figure that in about a week or so this posting will be the most-visited page in the universe. Heh.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)