Google’s new trend tool (Google Trends) highlights a problem that many experts had predicted but until now had lacked supporting data. The United States has dropped down to 8th in international porn searches. The U.S. is behind Canada, UK and most threatening India. Even more scary is that China is not yet on the list. What happens when that country’s 1 billion web surfers discovers what cool things can be searched on Google Images?

Researchers have long bemoaned the said state of education in the United States, especially in math and science. Until now, many had believed that was because U.S. youths were searching for porn instead doing their studies on the computer. However it is clear that this not the case. It’s possible that the male adolescents who used to search for porn are now too busy with social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. SMS and text messaging may also be taking its toll since gawking at a long-legged hottie on a tiny little mobile screen is untitillating other than for the most desperate individuals.***

The long-term impact of the U.S.’s declining interest in all things XXX is unclear but it is entirely possible that we are going to see an increasing number of pornos come from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (possible titles could include “In my Outback” or “No Little Shrimp for this Barbie”). The economic impact to Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley is very real and they may have to start casting big boned women with bad teeth to keep their products relevant to the world market.

h/t and hello: Eclair for this story.

More on Google Trends here.

***Or so we’ve heard.

tags: google google trends Search

Update: One reason that the U.S. may be lagging in Internet porn searchers has been reported in this morning’s LA Observed. Kevin discussed KNBC’s hyping up a non-story about a USC professor’s naked breasts on Flickr[NSFW!]. Normally we would be all over a story like this and we couldn’t click fast enough to see what all of the fuss was about. However upon seeing said photo (1 was enough) and then reading some of the descriptive words (”national geographic breasts”) our interest quickly sagged. To me the most embarrassin

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 6:36 am by Insider and is filed under Not the conventional wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.