The elusive st points me to this story about defense lawyers in a Florida obscenity trial using Google Trends to define "community standards." From the NYT:
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
1 comment:
I'm guessing the yearly apple pie spike coincides with Thanksgiving.
And who can forget the great orgy spike of '06--when orgies were more popular than surfing. Those were the days.
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