Did you know that there's a section of the population using the Internet to look at porn?
Some of them are probably even doing it right now.
Stuart Lawley caught on to that trend and started ICM Registry, a service that lets you register a website that ends in .xxx. It also maintains Search.xxx, a Google-like search engine for finding exactly what you want in your adult entertainment.
We spoke to Lawley over the phone today about how the registry and its search engine works.
One key differentiator: Porn is very popular among hackers as a lure for unsuspecting searchers. Who's going to admit that they visited a porn site and got their credit card stolen? So Lawley decided to address those concerns head-on.
"A site with a .xxx domain offers the same dirty porn, but the idea is that it's there in a clean wrapper," he said.
ICM doesn't just sell .xxx domains, it also operates them. When you type a domain name ending in .xxx, ICM's servers tell your computer how to find it. It can scan those sites for malware all the time, which is a level of care not even taken at the more popular .com domains.
".xxx sites are the safest on the Internet with respect to malware," said Lawley.
Users win, Lawley says, because they can browse for porn more confidently and not worry about malware. Businesses win because users spend more time browsing and can spend more money. And people who want nothing to do with porn win because they can exercise sense and avoid sites ending in .xxx.
"When we got to 20 million pages of porn, we thought, 'That's enough porn for anyone. Time to launch a search engine,'" he said. Thus began Search.xxx, which combs .xxx sites daily, ranking sites based on keywords, relevance, metadata, and backlinks. This is very similar to how Google operates, but with one key difference—its users are explicitly looking for porn.
Citing a vulgar term for a part of the female anatomy, Lawley says that on Google, "you'll only find what you're looking for after seven pages of articles about Pussy Riot."
And people seem to love using the site. In its first week of operation, Search.xxx drew two million visitors and totally exceeded the company's expectations.
Looks like Internet porn is here to stay. And thanks to Lawley, it's a little bit safer.
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