Sex and pornography are losing out to e-commerce among users of the Excite Web search engine, according to a study by a Penn State professor.

Amanda Spink, associate professor of information sciences and technology, and three colleagues found the percentage of searches for information about "entertainment or recreation" and "sex and pornography" decreased over a four-year span, while searches for information about "commerce, travel, employment or economy" and "people, places or things" were more popular.

Their article, "From e-sex to e-commerce: Web search changes," was printed in the March 2002 issue of IEEE Computer magazine.

Spink used three data sets collected from the Excite Web search engine in September 1997, December 1999 and May 2001.

Researchers randomly chose 2,500 searches from each year to classify into 11 general topic categories.

While about one in six searches were for "sex and pornography" in 1997, the amount dropped to only one in 12 in 2000.

"Entertainment is still a very sizable and important aspect of the Internet," Shaoyi He, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, said.

The researchers also found that in most aspects, user behavior has changed minimally.

For each of the years studied, most Excite users entered one or two words per search.

The percentage of users who viewed only one page of 10 results per search increased from 28.6 percent in 1997 to 50.5 percent in 2001.

"You could argue that search engines have gotten better, but I'm not sure about that," Spink said.

"I think users aren't putting a lot of time into searching the Web."

Spink said the data might also reflect the continuous flow of beginners using search engines.

In their paper, the authors expressed a need for a new generation of Web searching tools based on a more thorough understanding of human information-seeking behaviors.

The tools should take into account the challenges people have when they are searching, the paper said.

Spink said that even though search engines are constantly being improved, people still have trouble using them. Users should be better trained, she said.

Spink's fellow researcher, He, also mentioned this problem.

"The information is there; the difficulty is getting the information you want," he said.

The authors of the study admit that the availability of data from one search engine was a limitation.

He said he is not aware of any similar studies of different search engines, which he said should be done before making broad conclusions.

Spink said the researchers were lucky to get data from Excite because most commercial search engines are not willing to go public with their data due to competition.