A recent report says that Google, in order to try to beat back growing competition from other search engines (wonder why that might be necessary?), has added a billion pages to what it spiders, from 3.3 to 4.3 billion pages. Most notably, it's spidering a lot more images -- doubling its count to almost a billion. The results are quite bizarre. The Raven, whose wonderful writing ceased a half year ago, has suddenly jumped up in the rankings again, with over two thirds of his 400-some hits per day coming from Google Image searches, virtually all of them clearly in search of porn. The Raven was always discreet and tasteful, but not afraid to lampoon trashy contemporary culture, so his searchers must almost undoubtedly leave disappointed, though slightly better informed.

And Standing Room Only's Hugh Elliott, back to his thoughtful and literate blog after a lengthy hiatus, himself laments that his recent surpassing of the 100,000 hit mark was 'empty and meaningless' and due mainly to people looking for porn. In fact, since the Google 'upgrade', one of Hugh's pictures, posted a year ago, called 'porn.jpg' has, all by itself, upped Hugh's hit count by close to 700 hits per day. And the picture isn't even pornographic, and it doesn't even appear on the first results page when you do an Image Search for 'porn'! Hugh deserves better. Go visit his blog for some fine writing, and especially check out his fiction archives.

I'll change the name of the picture to something untitillating in a few days, and track how much of an impact it makes on my daily hit count and ranking.

If the picture offends you, ask yourself why.