Now that we've found our porn, let's search for shopping

It looks like we're using search engines for shopping, travel and health information more often than sex, according to Austrailian IT.

Prof Spinks said there were multiple reasons behind the fall of sex-related topics from the top spot.

"It could be the favourites are bookmarked or an overwhelming increase in people looking for information," Prof Spinks said.

"More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.

"The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 1990s."

I also think that we find information differently now. Blogs, communities, lists, social networking, all the magazines and newspapers and hubs and everything highlighting links to what they think the visitors want to see – we can go directly to the sexual and pornographic content we want without using a general search engine to find it.

We're also using the web from our offices quite a bit, where it's tacitly ok to make travel arrangements and look up health conditions like dermatitis, but overtly not ok to search for "breast redhead mature."