Internet surfers losing their passion for porn

People are spending less time online searching for pornography and more on business and travel than they were five years ago, a study by American researchers has found.

Search engine users are also becoming less patient – and are rarely willing to go beyond two pages of search results, the team found.

In 1997, nearly 17 per cent of searches through the Excite search engine – then one of the premier cataloguers of the internet – were for sexually related items, said Amanda Spink, a researcher at Penn State University. By 2001 the ratio was down to 8.5 per cent, and many of those queries related not to pornography but to human sexuality. At the same time, searches in fields classed as "commerce, travel and employment" rose from 13.3 per cent to 24.7 per cent, in line with the 80 per cent increase in commercial content on the Web.

Ms Spink said: "In 1997, you probably had a higher proportion of university people, of young guys who knew about computers. Now you have more the average person, and the average person may not be as interested in sex and pornography."

Changes in the behaviour of people who use search engines were also noted. In 1997, less than 30 per cent examined only one page of 10 results per query. By 2001, the percentage was more than 50 per cent and 70 per cent would not go beyond two pages.