Grotica – Google Erotica Engine or Webmaster World Joke?
While running across the search engine news this morning I found a press release, apparently from Google, hosted on Pressbox.co.uk and indexed in Google News. The release is titled “Google Unveils New Erotica Search Engine” and appeared to be a release from the Google PR Offices. According to the release Google will be “entering the adult entertainment market” with Grotica, an erotica-only search engine where Google will transfer all of their adult oriented index of web pages, videos and images. Upon checking out the Grotica.com site, it seemed to be down. Then after looking at the Whois info for the site, it was registered by WebmasterWorld, the super popular webmaster forum.
Hmmm, is something going on here? Perhaps Brett or one of the folks at WMW is trying to test out the editorial process of multiple press release distribution sites and especially those indexed in Google News. These sites are making a large bit of income by publicizing their distribution and charging for press release uploads into their content. Maybe this is some sort of Webmaster World story? After some searches for Grotica.com on different search engines I only found the Pressbox.co.uk listing and a no-info Google listing to a non-functional site.
Here’s a bit of the false release : September 15, 2005 ,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.
Titled “Google unveils new erotica search engine” the release should have immediately set off the crap alarms at Pressbox. Not to mention the terrible boilerplate release style and the obvious joke in the PR contact’s name and contact information : Linda S. Boreman, 650.253.4950 [the real Google media contact number], lovelace@google.com. Wouldn’t the hiring of one of hiring most famous porn stars, Linda Lovelace, make news? I mean, I’d find this half as interesting as the Vint Cerf hiring. Come on Pressbox, get with the program and hire some editors.
