This article contains sexually explicit material that may be NSFW.
Everyone has a favorite search engine for finding porn. But it’s a well-established fact that thanks to certain tech juggernauts imposing restrictions on adult content in search results, some search engines are just better at finding smut than others (*cough Bing cough*).
If you have an ultra-high-powered government job, or you share a computer with a roommate who’s studying for the clergy, there’s always a concern that your late-night searches for busty Brazilian teens will show up in your search history. But apparently, you won’t have to worry about that happening with Boodigo, which is being touted as “the world’s first adult search engine.”
Unlike other search engines, which make it intentionally difficult for users to access naughtier content, Boodigo “is designed to find ‘real’ adult sites and give top listings to them,” Colin Rowntree, one of Boodigo’s founders, said in a press release. “That avoids the problem of going to Google, searching for, say, ‘blowjob’, and getting the first multiple results pages of Wikipedia articles, women’s magazine how-to guides, etc., before the online user can actually find a link to sites that focus on blowjob photos and movies.”
Boodigo isn’t actually the first search engine designed exclusively for porn: There’s also Search.xxx, an adult-friendly mockup of Google, as well as PornMD. But unlike PornMD, which will take you directly to free tube sites (which many performers in the adult industry have claimed encourages the spread of illegal piracy), Boodigo is marketing itself as a search engine for the ethical porn aficionado: The site directs you to individual performer and studio pay sites, instead of sites that might feature illegally posted or unlicensed content.
Curious about the potential of a porn search engine that encourages people to actually pay for porn, I decided to give Boodigo a whirl. I started with an easy one: adult performer and Duke porn star Belle Knox, whom I met at her birthday party earlier this year. Here’s what came up when I searched for Knox on Google, sans SafeSearch settings:
And here’s Knox on Boodigo:
These search results either link to Belle’s entries on various porn databases, or to pay sites that feature her work, where you have to again search for her there. (Not all of them even do: Baremaidens.com, for instance, which shows up in a Boodigo search, features performers named “Bailey Knox” and “Natasha Belle,” but not the Duke porn star herself.)
Next, I tried “eel anal porn,” based on an unnamed coworker’s suggestion that a film called Eels Out the Ass Like Whoa is a real thing.
When I searched on Google, the clip immediately came up in the second search result, for better or for worse:
Sadly, that was not the case on Boodigo. Apparently, the site had some trouble differentiating between the specific niche I was searching for (i.e. eel anal porn), and good old-fashioned anal porn, which in the world of porn searches is kind of like being unable to tell the difference between a Burgundy and a Bordeaux and just saying, “meh, they’re both red wines.”
Boodigo also pulled up a performer named “Anal Alan,” whom I had never heard of but apparently has an empty YouTube channel. (Given that his height is listed as “0,” I guess it’s no surprise that his career never took off.)
Because “eel anal porn” is admittedly fairly obscure, I decided to search for just “anal.” My luck was a little better with Boodigo this time around:
Not so much with Google, however, which pulled up Wikipedia and the r/anal subreddit in lieu of actual anal porn:
That’s like asking for a glass of Bordeaux and getting a warm can of 7-Up instead. Shame on you, Google. Shame. On. You.
So, OK, if it wants to go around calling itself the world’s first porn search engine, Boodigo obviously needs to work out a few kinks first. But in light of Google’s recent AdWords policy change restricting adult content advertising, many porn performers and producers have expressed concern that tech giants are increasingly censoring adult content, which might lead to them eliminating adult content from their platforms altogether.
If that actually ever happens, a search engine like Boodigo won’t just be helpful to porn aficionados looking for a secure, anonymous, cookie-free J.O. experience—it’ll be necessary. Let’s just hope for the sake of eel anal enthusiasts that it tweaks its algorithms a bit first.
Photo via morgueFile Archive (PD)
