"Gorean" web searches this weekend

Posted by Tanos on Tue 23 May 06, 2:58 AM

On Thursday 18th and Friday 19th May most of the national newspapers in the UK picked up a local story about a man claiming to be running a "Kaotian" variant of Gor, who had some unwelcome attention from the police (but nothing for them to bring charges about.) All of the stories prominently mentioned "Goreans" and told readers they are a widespread "sex slave" subculture in the UK (with 25,000 members according to some versions.) As a result, I've seen a dramatic increase in the number of visits to my websites from people searching with Google etc for "Goreans".

The Telegraph version of the story was probably the most in depth, with photographs of cuffed women in the printed version, and a sidebox to explain Gor. The BBC version also benefitted from an audio interview with the "Kaotian" master in question (who appeared on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 - with broadly supportive reaction from the subsequent phone in.)

This case prompted several threads on IC (Sex slavery in suburbia, Gor Discussion on Radio 2, My response to Daily Mirror 'Gor' article) and one I started on TSR.

Once the story broke, with "Goreans" mentioned so clearly, I realised I could look for the effect of this word appearing in the mainstream media by examining the searches that led people to my websites.

This is possible because when you use the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) to look for a word or phrase, and click on one of the links that is returned, the website you go to receives a notification of the search terms used. Over the last week, Informed Consent received 631 hits as the result of searches including "Gorean" or "Goreans"; whilst The Slave Register received 1487. A huge increase, since normally only a handful of hits per day come from these terms.

You can see this much more clearly with this graph: the day of the month goes along the bottom, from Wednesday 17th of May to midnight at the end of Monday 22nd May UK time; and the number of hits per hour is shown in blue for IC and red for TSR.

IC has almost got back to the normal situation before the stories of the 18th, but TSR is still getting more hits than normal for these kinds of searches.

I've not been able to find any solid evidence of an increased number of people joining the sites as a result: the Gorean searches are a tiny fraction of the millions of hits IC and TSR receive each week, and although both sites received more new members this week (944) than last week (727) the join rate fluctuates quite a bit week to week, and the underlying trend is always upways anyway.

Most of the searches themselves were for the single word "goreans", but many were for "gorean" plus one of several place names in the UK unconnected with the newspaper stories - probably from people looking for local gorean groups. Significantly, one or two were very explicit about this: "become a gorean slave" and "goreans how to join in".

Edited Fri 4 Aug 06, 10:18 AM by Tanos