Watching Porn on the Web – Pleasure for Some, Work for Others

(Almost) all do it, but nobody admits it openly: watching porn on the web. Some people even do this professionally. Cliqz employs a quality team whose numerous tasks also include checking websites for pornographic content. Its members are officially looking at porn sites at work!

What may sound like a dream job to some people is in fact hard work and a lot of effort. The team evaluates thousands of URLs and websites every month in order to identify those with adult content, among other things. This is important for a search engine to improve search quality and always provide users with the most relevant results. Secondly, it is necessary to prevent (underage) users from inadvertently landing on pages with 18+ content.

Such sites are regularly reported by users, among others. The quality team then checks whether these are actually porn sites. If this is the case, it adds the URLs to a filter list. Websites can often be identified as porn sites by their URL, but not always. In many cases, only a glance at the actual content can help.

There are some porn sites with a completely harmless URL. Usually this URL belonged to another website but was then abandoned or sold. Afterwards the new owner uses the web address for “slightly different” content. This way, users who are looking for the old site will suddenly end up on the new porn site. This is a good example of the challenges that search engines face when evaluating websites.

Of course, many users look specifically for porn sites. On average, the proportion of search queries and page impressions with adult content is around 3.5 %, according to the strictly anonymous statistics of the Cliqz search engine. During the night, the proportion is regularly in the double-digit percentage range, in some cases rising to more than 20 %. This is also due to the fact that significantly fewer search queries are submitted and pages are opened at night than during the day.

As of 11 pm it’s getting down to business – when children and/or spouses are sleeping: From this time on, the proportion of search queries and page impressions with pornographic content increases regularly. The climax is then reached between 3 and 5 a.m. Around noon, the share is usually only 1 to 2 % of total traffic. Apparently other needs take precedence at this time – enjoy your meal!

Watching porn online is nothing to be ashamed of. However, most people prefer to do it secretly, in so-called “Incognito Mode” or private mode. However, this does not in any way ensure that you are completely anonymous on the web. It does not hide your identity from the rest of the world, but only your online activities from other people using your device. Website operators, your Internet service provider (ISP) or your employer can still track which pages you have visited. Therefore, Incognito Mode does not allow you to anonymously watch porn on the web.

Basically, the private mode feature is useful if you share a device with someone and want to hide your browsing activities from them. The Cliqz Browser simplifies this by, for example, automatically opening websites with adult content in private mode aka “Forget Mode” – internally we call this feature “Porn Mode”. For this purpose, we use the continuously expanded and updated filter list. URLs from this filter list will not be displayed in the Cliqz search results either, depending on the youth protection filter setting in the Cliqz Browser. The “Automatic Forget Mode” ensures that visited websites will not be saved to your browser history.

In addition, the Cliqz Browser provides built-in tracking protection, which uses artificial intelligence to reliably prevent you from being identified via cookies or fingerprinting. This hides your identity from trackers and protects your privacy on the internet.

The Cliqz Browser is available for free download for Windows and macOS. A mobile version is available for Android and iOS.