Former Google employees develop search engine for pornography

Los Angeles: It’s not every day that a new search engine takes its place on the Internet, much less one specialising in pornography as is the case with Boodigo, a tool developed by former Google employees who plan to make it the portal for the adult entertainment industry on the Web. [caption id=“attachment_1726175” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AFP[/caption] Boodigo made its official debut 15 September and “has taken off like a rocket”, Colin Rowntree, one of its founders and also the owner of the Wasteland.com festishist porn site, told Spain’s EFE news agency in a telephone interview. Rowntree and Wasteland teamed up with Los Angeles tech company 0x7a69, whose engineers spent over a year developing Boodigo’s operating system, including an algorithm that prioritises links that are dismissed by mainstream search engines. “Google and Bing have gradually been weeding out the industry’s adult content and that (for us) has been tremendously frustrating. If someone is looking for videos of oral sex and tries to find them via Google, what they get is an article by Wikipedia and advice from Cosmopolitan. And when they get what they’re looking for it can well be pirated material,” Rowntree said. Despite being taboo for many people, pornography is tremendously popular on the internet as shown by Google statistics, where the term “porn” has had a rate of interest no less than 80 percent since 2010 on a scale of 1 to 100 used to measure trends on the search engine. Boodigo is organised with a double process of verification, which in the first place associates key words of the search with content, and secondly checks to see that the content belongs to trustworthy sites and not to pirate sites with fraudulent and malicious intentions, the Boodigo founder said. The search engine was also designed to guard the user’s anonymity. According to its privacy policy, “Boodigo does not use cookies or other user-tracking technologies to gather information about our users.” “That makes us different from Google and Bing, and was another reason for creating it,” Rowntree said. IANS