Subject: Women of the web

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 16:28:41 +0200

Hi,

I just read an article on Wired that reasoned something along the lines of:

"internet is for horny nerds => women don't want to be nerds => women are
computer illiterate"

I will not voice my opinion.

The article however included information that could be checked:
" But when she started surfing for sites to link to the center's homepage,
she was appalled at the measly content she found; plugging "women" or
"girls" into a search engines frequently turned up porn, and the so-called
"women's sites" dished up fare about as stimulating as instant mashed
potatoes. "
So I run "women" on google: (editted the description, but this is what
appeard on the first page)
Category: Society > People > Women > History
<http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/People/Women/History/> 

Welcome to Women.com: Where women are going <http://www.women.com/>
National Organization for Women ( NOW ) <http://www.now.org/>
Women Mathematicians <http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/women.htm>
National Women's History Project <http://www.nwhp.org/>
Diotima: Women & Gender in the Ancient World
<http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/gender.html>
4000 Years of Women in Science <http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/4000WS.html>
Welcome to the American Association of University Women
<http://www.aauw.org/>
League of Women Voters <http://www.lwv.org/>
The National Women's Health Information Center (NWHIC)
<http://www.4woman.gov/>
WITI - Women In Technology International - Women Advancing ...
<http://www.witi.com/>
Needless to say, all those are highly feministic sites. (I didn't check the
sites themselves, if "Women Mathematicians" is a kinky sex site, don't blame
me)
The results for "girls" are less exciting, but didn't include any porn site
either.
I can understand that people invent facts to support their opinions, but it
takes real talent to do so with something that can easily be checked.
Thanks,
Chen.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 May 2001 08:15:45 -0400

Chen Shapira <[email-masked]> writes:

> So I run "women" on google: 

Maybe search engines are rigged for what different kinds of people 
look for?

I recall that when I first learned about Google I ran "the latex test"
on it. It used to be (in those days) that running a search on latex
(or LaTeX) turned on a lot of condom, fetish, and other chemistry
sites. Google turned up LaTeX manuals. I have been using Google for
web searching ever since.

What a pity it doesn't turn up sites on sexy women in mathematics. ;-)

By the way, www.playboy.com used to have a decent computer column,
proving that you don't have to be dumb to be a playmate. Is it still
there?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
"I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs."

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 12:37:33 +0300

> web searching ever since.

If you're interested to find out how Google works, take a look at
http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm

It's an article titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web
Search Engine" which explains how Google works. This talk was given in the 7th
WWW conference (in 1998), by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - then two
CS graduate students in Stanford, and now Google executives.

The idea is, to put it simply, google doesn't care only about a web-page
and the words in it - it puts a lot of emphasis on how many (and which)
other pages link to that page, and what text is used to link to this page.
So for example, even a very popular condom page (assuming such a page
exists ;)) is not likely to be linked as A HREF="..." the latex page /A.
So searching for latex, you are likely to get a page which mentions latex
(preferably in the title), but more importantly - that many other pages
(preferably themselves "quality pages" - see the full article for more about
that) link to this page with the word "latex" in the link page.

The Google article has a varient of this "latex" test - the "Bill Clinton"
test. They say how a person search for "Bill Clinton" on a contemporary
search engine got, as the first result, a page containing only the 3 words:
"Bill Clinton Suck". After all, 2/3 of all the text of that page was the
search terms, so it must be highly relevant. Right? Wrong :) Google finds,
as a first result, whitehouse.gov, because it works by finding the
Clinton-related site that most people would care enough about to link to,
and that is of course not the 3-word page.

And why didn't you find much porn among the "women" results? Well, there can
be several explanation
1. A lot of the porn pages want to be popular, but they are actually not.
   Not many sites link to them. Do you have a link to a porn page on your
   homepage?
2. The most linked-to sites are probably big indexes and search engines,
   a la yahoo. This means that their links to other site have a very big
   weight in google's rankings. And crappy porn pages don't appear in Yahoo,
   or other such "respectable" indexes.
3. porn sites (because of explanation #1 above) often try to "spam" search
   engines, by stuffing keywords into their site, nominating variants of
   the same site thousands of times, and so on. So Google and the other search
   engines might be actively trying to curb these attempts, and as a result
   lowering the number of these sites appearing on the search.

> proving that you don't have to be dumb to be a playmate. Is it still

Playboy is really an enigma. I saw a while ago on C-SPAN, a lecture (in some
important media event) by Playboy's owner (I forgot her name, she's the
daughter of the original owner), and she was talking in an extremely intelligent
manner, and about very interesting issues. But let's face it - men don't buy
Playboy for these discussions, nor its computer column. They buy it for the
nudie-pictures and centerfold. According to that interview, when playboy
started their Internet site they decided to focus more on the soft-porno than
on the articles, because they found that that is what people were really
looking for anyway.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Wednesday, May  2 2001, 9 Iyyar 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |AlGoreithm, n: Repeating a calculation
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |until a prior desired result is produced.

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 13:50:49 +0300 (IDT)

> Sites snipped.

> takes real talent to do so with something that can easily be checked.

The question is whether such encouraging results would turn up on all
search engines. Google is a very good search engine which uses some
sophisticated techniques that other engines don't. Did you try to search
for it using AltaVista, or Excite, or Lycos or any other of the major
search sites?

Of course, Google's methods are not always perfect. (re: "More Evil" ==>
Microsoft.com).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked] 
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes
what went wrong more quickly.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 May 2001 15:34:15 +0300

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes:

> It's an article titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual
> Web Search Engine" which explains how Google works. This talk was
> given in the 7th WWW conference (in 1998), by Sergey Brin and
> Lawrence Page - then two CS graduate students in Stanford, and now
> Google executives.

I read that (or a similar article) right after running the latex test.

I would be careful about making assumptions or guesses about porn
sites. They are widely regarded to be the most advanced and successful
web enterprises, and they are usually considered to be way ahead of
most of the rest of the world as far as sophistication and technology
go.  I would tend to assume that the best of them are very good at
getting themselves into search engines, not just by hiding thousands
of generic keywords in the page source, unless the latter have
policies designed to weed porn out (most search engines have a
complicated and tedious off-line registration process). I recall
noticing an "Adult Entertainment" section or something of the kind on
Yahoo!  (I don't use Yahoo! often though).

Whether or not porn sites compete with each other to the extent that
they don't cross-link, or they do cross-link extensively, I don't
know. I wouldn't bet that whitehouse.gov has more links to it than
whitehouse.com.

> Playboy is really an enigma. I saw a while ago on C-SPAN, a lecture
> (in some important media event) by Playboy's owner (I forgot her
> name, she's the daughter of the original owner), and she was talking
> in an extremely intelligent manner, and about very interesting
> issues. But let's face it - men don't buy Playboy for these
> discussions, nor its computer column. They buy it for the
> nudie-pictures and centerfold.

Have you read (I mean, read) Playboy? I, as many people, consider it a
very interesting magazine, it has one of the best literature sections
of all the glossies, interesting interviews and articles.  And as for
pictures and centerfolds, if you care to look, it is in a totally
different league than Penthouse, Hustler, and others - practically
innocent IMHO. Flame away, but don't generalize on why men buy Playboy
too quickly. For the record, I haven't bought a copy for ages (grown
up? ;-) - maybe it's changed...

> According to that interview, when playboy started their Internet
> site they decided to focus more on the soft-porno than on the
> articles, because they found that that is what people were really
> looking for anyway.

Sure. This is hackers-il, and the topic is "Women of the web". Let's
face it - that's what people are really looking for... ;-)

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 18:31:34 +0300

> know. I wouldn't bet that whitehouse.gov has more links to it than

You are right that I didn't do much research on the subject, but I'm
quite doubtful. Just think - who would like to whitehouse.gov? People
writing pages about Bill Clinton, about the U.S., about the presidency
in the U.S., people who work in the whitehouse, and all-in-all I would
think that thousands of different pages, by thousands of different real
people, probably link to whitehouse.gov.

But who would link to whitehouse.com (a porn site, I presume)? I know I
wouldn't, even if it were my favorite site (and it isn't ;)). Just like
people order bawdy magazines to their houses want them to be enclosed in
an opaque and mark-free envelope - it's not the kind of thing you usually
want to tell others about, even if it's your favorite pastime. Sure, porn
sites may cross-link (I don't know if they do), and some illegal mp3 sites
link to porn sites (I'm still not exactly sure why...), but I think that
the general population, the *millions* of homepages out there, doesn't
normally link to it.

Of course, all I'm saying is my own hunches. I also wouldn't bet on it :)
(casino sites are a different subject altogether ;)). I think neither of
us are talking from experience or from doing research on the issue...

> very interesting magazine, it has one of the best literature sections

Frankly, no.

> up? ;-) - maybe it's changed...

Your last sentence is a Freudian slip - with it you show how you also
think that Playboy is really about the bawdy pictures that a teenage
would look for, and not about the articles a sophisticated adult would
look for. If this was an interesting magazine with serious articles and
a great computer column, what would growing up have to do with stopping
to read it?

Anyway, I agreed that I found Playboy an Enigma, because certainly it has
interesting articles and writers. But so does Time magazine, the New Yorker,
and a dozen other magazines I could read; wouldn't you agree that the people
who choose Playboy do so for the pictures? As I said, Mrs. Hefner (maybe
she's the granddaughter, not the daughter, of Hugh Hefner?) in her own
lecture conceded that when they did their web-site, a survey of potential
users showed that it was the pictures, not the articles, that users would
want most to see. I don't know whether the current site still focuses on
the pictures - I haven't checked it out.

By the way, in the U.S. there are other magazines that combine "respectable"
articles with female pictures. If I remember correctly, Sports Illustrated
has a swimsuit issue every year, and it doesn't discuss the sport-related
issues of swimming ;)

> face it - that's what people are really looking for... ;-)

Yes, hackers-il doesn't have much to with programming, as 90% of the previous
threads showed. But I like it this way.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Wednesday, May  2 2001, 10 Iyyar 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |A Nobel Peace Prize? I would KILL for
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |one of those.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 May 2001 14:14:56 +0300

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes:

> People

You are right, of course: people looking for Bill Clinton will find
whitehouse.gov (or would they? :-)).

> But who would link to whitehouse.com (a porn site, I presume)? 

Other similar sites? That's what I said - I have no idea whether that
industry is primarily competitive or co-operative.

> look for. 

It was not intended to be a Freudian slip - I put a smiley there
intentionally, referring obliquely to the prevalent perception. I used
to read Playboy (enjoying the pictures on the way - but as I said - I
find them quite innocent, PG13 probably), and even considered
subscribing to it when I lived in the US. I am not ashamed of it in
any way, and what I wrote about my opinion of Playboy was very serious.