About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft’s MSN are sexually explicit, according to a government-commissioned study. The US Department of Justice commissioned the study by Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took the US government to court over the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
From a random sample of search engine queries, Stark estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at AOL, MSN, and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and MSN fall in that category.
About 6% of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.
Filters typically block 85-90% of the pornographic sites, based on the quality of the filter and the user settings. Less restrictive user settings may only block 40%.
Learn more by reading copyrighted stories by the Associated Press at ABCnews online and MSNBC.