Google’s Erotic Search Engine Is a Hoax
“Is this for real?,” I thought when I read this article in WebProWorld about the purported press release from Google here.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today its plans to enter the lucrative adult content market with a new search engine that will be kept separate from its main line of search services.
Called Grotica, the new service uses sophisticated image processing tools to automatically categorize still photos and movies according to subject matter and degree of explicitness. Google’s powerful keyword search functions have been further enhanced for this application with over 3000 synonyms for anatomical terms and erotic activities.
When users visit Grotica.com they will be able to specify a plain language description of the material they are searching for, or point the search engine to an existing image containing similar content. Grotica will then use a proprietary ranking algorithm to return the most relevant hits.
Naturally, Google has anticipated objections of some customers to this new business line. The company emphasizes that since Grotica will be entirely separate from its other web services, filtering software such as SafeSearch and NetNanny will easily be able to block access to the site by minors.
The new service is expected to generate over $35 million in advertising revenue in the first three months of release.
If this is a hoax - which seems likely given that the media contact in the release is a “Linda S. Boreman” whose email is lovelace@google.com, and the domain name in the release “Grotica.com” is registered to WebmasterWorld - its pretty funny.
According to one of the moderators on the WebproWorld forums Boreman is better known as the star of the infamous seventies smut film, “Deep Throat,” when she was known as Linda Lovelace.
My B.S. radar went up the minute I realised the only place the press release was available was on a single press release site, and nowhere else on the web - not even on the Google blog (which would be the first place to report it).
Nice try, guys! At least we know now which press release site doesn’t pay its editors well.
