Once upon a time there was a TV show called Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. The show never did that well ratings-wise, which lead them to develop the ongoing romantic interest between two of the three leads faster than a show otherwise might. They also determined that the title may be too complicated for modern audiences, so they dropped the pizza joint, leaving the show as Two Guys and a Girl. It wasn’t the greatest show, but it did leave me curious how things would turn out.

Meanwhile, at about that same time in the land of Napster, it was really difficult to download anything by the band “Live” because, well, any live song recorded by anyone would show up on the search results. You had to pretty much go song by song until Audio Galaxy came along.

Today, on BitTorrent, I discovered that trying to retrieve episodes of the old TV show Two Guys and a Girl makes for a naughty query indeed.


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2 Responses to The Dubious Query

  1. Webmaster says:

    Entirely unsurprising, really.

    Every great visual technology has been spurred, in its infancy, by the pornography industry.

    The printing press was quickly engaged for the mass production of risque books and plate-printings.

    Motion picture technology created the ‘adult only’ theater.

    Home video technology (vhs) enabled people to buy the stuff and watch it in the privacy of their own homes… and it sold well.

    DVD’s? You’d better believe that the porn makers quickly got into that market.

    The internet? Oh yeah.

    I remember a somewhat humorous article on one of the commentary mags (I think it was either Salon or Slate or somewhere) where a writer opined that he was trying to do a google search to find a good gift for his teenage neice, who was into surfing, skiing, and swimming.

    His search query of choice? “Teenage girl water sports.” And that’s the starting point for the article on what he found instead and how a seemingly innocuous query can go very wrong.

  2. trumwill says:

    Oh, I wasn’t as surprised as I was amused.

    Relatedly, I do find Sony’s attempts to shut the porn industry out of Blu-Ray to be interesting given the history of pornography in media.

    The coolest porn-related innovation was online credit card payments.

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