Mother Medusa: Setting Porn Searches In Stone

Sometimes it’s the little things that can be the most fun (or at least that’s what women have been telling me all this time).

It would probably be rather eye-opening, and potentially soul-destroying, if you tried to work out just how many porn videos are being watched concurrently at any one given time. The thought of all that wasted… erm… productivity is enough to send chills down the spine.

…but if you ARE curious, then there are ways and means to satisfy that weird completist urge. Porn MD’s live search stream keeps you posted on just what people are looking up at that very minute. It’s the next best thing to being in the room with them, which frankly would be more than a little awkward anyway.

Brisbane resident Ben McLeay (whose Twitter feed is really worth a follow) decided to add a pinch of something else to the formula to create something which, while taking very little effort and time, can be appropriated as a most modern piece of art.

Mother Medusa collects these ghostly and disconnected search terms, presenting them to viewers against a calming background shot of hot air balloons. The bubbling of phrases such as “guys finger themselves”, “worms mouse insects” and “cum frok pegging” against a serene and idyllic picture-perfect setting soon becomes compulsive viewing, reading like an array of deranged greeting cards from another dimension. Like we said, it’s the little things.

For those curious as to how this all works, Ben picks up the thread: “Porn MD has an ajax call exposed that provides something like 200 keywords they’ve received recently, I made a PHP file that when hit just requests the Porn MD endpoint (because if you do it with straight javascript you run into cross origin request issues). The 200 keywords are then stored in the javascript and it was a function running every few seconds that takes the next one off the stack, injects it into the page with a random font size, then animates its opacity down to 0.”

Simple, right?! Sure enough, this window into the mind of millions of horny souls throws up some fantastic search terms. It must be how Professor Charles Xavier would feel if he walked right into the middle of an orgy.

Ben agrees that since he established the site and allowed it to run he’s seen some rather unconventional searches, but he has a clear winner for his favorite: “It’s probably not the weirdest but definitely the funniest I’ve seen was “nude woman”. The idea that someone has gone to this massive porn aggregate site and been like ‘Ahh I hope I can find at least one video of a nude woman somewhere on here’ really cracks me up.”

Of course, the internet being what it is there’s even been complaints! After the site was posted in a reddit thread, Ben says, “there were people complaining that you can’t click on the keywords to search for them. Frankly, if you want to see ‘grandpa horse fisting’ you can search it on your own time.”

It’s all compulsive viewing. Just pray one of your own search terms doesn’t spring up one day!

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