A 25% Tax on Internet Porn and the Google Bondoogle II - Wrath of the Sandbox

I wish I had one of these…

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat from Arkansas, (a Democrat from Arkansas is someone who disagrees with Republicans only when it won’t upset too many Republicans) has proposed a 25% tax on Internet pornography. She wants the bill to raise her profile and ensure her re-election money to ‘…protect children from Internet-related crimes.’

Okay, I’ll try and explain this in terms even politicians can understand:

Pornography is to child pornography, as skeet shooting is to armed robbery

Additionally, when did businesses start paying to protect citizens from their products? Where’s the 25% tax on cars, which are proven to kill thousands of people a year - often because of the way they’re designed as much as how they’re driven? Where’s the 25% tax on guns, another product which hurts thousands?

Where’s the proof that pornography is capable of producing an ‘Internet related crime’ anyway? Why is looking at a pair of breasts on your computer more harmful than looking at them on your TV?

This proposal is fuckwittery of the highest order. If we want to protect children, let’s build a .kids domain and then restrict the companies who have access to it.

Moving on, as I wait for Google to respond to my email (and I’m betting they never will) I’ve learned that PSP Porn is probably in something called the ’sandbox’.

I’m realizing how lucky I have been to this point, never having had to worry about getting sites listed with search engines (and having a fourteen inch penis of course, that’s lucky too.)

The Google sandbox, which some claim doesn’t exist (others claim it has a red plastic spade in it), is purgatory for websites. It seems that in March 2004 Google a filter added (or didn’t depending on whom you ask) which puts new websites on ‘probation’. It’s designed to prevent Google from being a victim of its own success. It’s most easily explained using an example.

Suppose the Pope dies (could happen) and I, Sam Sugar, am chosen as his replacement. Simon Spammer (did you see what I did with the name there?), whose brother works in the Vatican, builds a million webpages with ‘Sam Sugar is the new Pope’ on them above a list of links to buy replacement inkjet printer cartridges. He posts his pages before the news gets very far, and Google, who can find and index pages very quickly indeed, find Simons pages and add them to their directory.

Then news that I’m Pope breaks and everyone who look for news on the story finds Simon Spammer’s pages at the top of their results.

The ’sandbox’ prevents this by restricting the full-inclusion of new pages with popular keywords for a period of 30-90 days. Google will look at the pages, but wait to see if they stay relevant over time. That way they hope to prevent spammers from exploiting any ability to produce pages quickly.

My guess is that PSP Porn is too hot a subject, and that Google have put my site on hold because it’s keyword rich and popular. We shall see…

People say that being popular quickly is a common reason for being put into the sandbox. Google’s wary if you appear to come out of nowhere (and PSP Porn gets more traffic than this blog - which has way more links in - and is even newer).

In case that’s true - feel free to link to TGP.com - it should launch in the next week or so and it will feature a referrers list. Not only will you help me stay out of the sandbox, you’ll also receive lots of lovely traffic when the site launches. If you do link in, and send me an email, I’ll tell you all about it. It’s going to be a tool for bloggers and a destination for horny wankers everywhere.

Finally, SugarBank is two months old today! Amazingly, if you convert that two months into highly accelerated Internet years, that makes this blog almost three months old - trippy huh? Where’s my cake? C’mon - let’s get baking people.