There’s no shortage of adult-oriented websites on the Internet these days, with some estimates suggesting sex-themed websites draw , accounting for nearly 30 percent of all online traffic.
Despite the explosion of adult content online, porn enthusiasts often have difficulty pinpointing the exact genre or performer they’re interested in — search engines and social media platforms like Google, Yahoo, Tumblr and Twitter have moved to block adult-oriented results, while others like Facebook and Instagram ban sexually suggestive imagery altogether. Worse, many popular porn sites play host to a slew of illicit videos that violate copyrights, advertisements that track users from site to site and even viruses that can wreak havoc on a computer.
And all that aside, there’s always the looming fear that your friend, co-worker brother or grandma might “borrow” your laptop or tablet for a second, only to learn from your Google results that you’ve fancied yourself some pizza delivery bondage porn.
Enter: BoodiGo, a new search engine that promises to help you find the adult content you want without the nasty side effects. It doesn’t save your search history or drop cookies on your computer or link you to websites with illicit porn videos and viruses. It’s the kind of service Edward Snowden might use when he feels the urge to give himself a hand.
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BoodiGo is the brainchild of Colin Rowntree, an entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience in the online adult industry. In an interview with TheBlot Magazine, Rowntree said he felt BoodiGo deserved a place on the Internet after noticing more-prominent search engines such as Google and Yahoo were dropping adult-oriented search results in favor of more safe-for-work websites — something that not only frustrated users who were searching for a specific kind of video or toy, but also the adult industry, which suddenly found a drop in web traffic (and, as a result, a decline in business).
“It became obvious something needed to be done,” Rowntree said. He recruited a handful of Google employees and set to work on BoodiGo on the assumption that his search engine would find a sizable audience with those disenfranchised by legacy search engines.
But Rowntree didn’t anticipate just how much of a hit his search engine would be. When it launched two months ago, it was flooded with requests following a spur of media attention. According to a press release, BoodiGo received more than two million unique visitors carrying out 10 million searches — a drop in the bucket compared to the 450 million views porn sites receive monthly, but still more than Rowntree anticipated for his startup.
“We realized we were going to have to devote additional servers to BoodiGo in order to support the amount of traffic and searches we were seeing,” Rowntree said in a statement. “The consumer response was just amazing and outpaced even our most enthusiastic projections.”
In theory, BoodiGo works a lot like Google: Type in what you’re looking for, hit “search,” and you’ll be presented with a list of links to relevant websites from around the Internet. BoodiGo doesn’t remember what you searched, nor does it sell your queries to advertisers, as other search engines do (searches do stay in your computer’s history though, so be sure to delete them).
In most cases, BoodiGo delivers relevant listings. Occasionally, you’ll hit an oddity — a search for the porn star “Brent Corrigan” returned, among other things, Corrigan’s website, a link to a Corrigan fan site on Tumblr and a Yahoo! Finance listing for the price of brent crude oil (the latter of which has had seven straight weeks of decline, prompting lower gas prices, in case you were wondering).
“One of the major challenges of running a porn search engine is to keep the results focused on porn and adult products and services,” Rowntree said by e-mail, adding that he personally spends a lot of time going through search engine results to remove errant listings as well as links to illicit file sharing and certain “tube” sites (some videos on sites like Xtube and YouPorn are listed, but only after BoodiGo has determined that the video is hosted legally). A partnership with the performance-rights organization ASCAP also from being listed. In the future, Rowntree says BoodiGo will offer a feedback tool that will allow users to report errant listings.
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One thing BoodiGo doesn’t do right now is make money, but that’s about to change: Rowntree told TheBlot that the site will soon launch an advertisement solution —tentatively called “BoodiAds” — that will function much like Google’s AdWords: Studios, porn stars and other adult sites will bid on keyword-based advertisement space, which will display somewhere in the results of a search. For example, a user who searches for a generic sex toy might see, among other things, ads for specific adult-oriented toys or toy shops, much in the way travelers see sponsored listings for hotels and airlines when they search for travel-related things on Google and Yahoo.
Another feature BoodiGo is planning: “BoodiCall,” an encrypted chat platform that will allow users (perhaps called “BoodiHeads” — just a suggestion) to communicate with each other. Those ideas are still being fleshed out, and there’s no estimated launch date.
For now, BoodiGo does one thing — and it does it pretty well. As Internet users in general become more security aware (thanks, largely, to recent revelations of domestic government spying), it’s easy to see how BoodiGo could evolve from a niche service to the penultimate online stop for privacy-conscious masturbators everywhere.
Matthew Keys is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine.
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