Cyber411 Calls on Other Sites to Ban Porno Ad Banners

Meta-search engine site Cyber411 marked its first anniversary of refusing to run pornographic advertising banners.

The site’s creator, Cyber Networks Inc., observed the anniversary by inviting other Web sites to follow its example and ban adult services ad banners.

“Admittedly, we did not always have this smut-free policy,” said Mark Galione, vice president for sales and marketing at Cyber Networks. “When Cyber411 first ramped up, we had over a half-million dollars in advertising contracts related to adult services banner ads. But almost immediately, our customers raised complaints. And quite frankly, they were correct–Cyber411 is used by corporations and families and it was inappropriate to have smutty banner ads on our site.”

“Whatever money may have been lost in cancelling these ads was more than compensated by the goodwill generated with our loyal customers, who were very pleased that we took their suggestions to heart,” said Galione.

Several other sites have recently adopted a similar policy, including Infoseek.

“We are not talking about censorship, nor do we wish to curtail anyone’s enjoyment of cyberspace,” Galione said. “But we urge our friends in this industry to stop and think about whether it is appropriate to present adult advertising in a medium which is heavily frequented by children and teenagers, and whether it is appropriate to assault business professionals using the Internet for corporate research with dubious banner advertising. There is a place in cyberspace for this kind of material, but that place is not on Web sites which are relied upon by business executives and young people.”

Cyber411 is a parallel meta-engine that simultaneously harnesses 16 of the top search engines on a single query. As the results are gathered, all duplicate URLs are automatically removed. Searches can be set to fit a specific time frame (i.e., within 30 seconds or 60 seconds). The 16 search engines employed in the Cyber411 search are AltaVista, DejaNews, Excite, Galaxy, GoTo, HotBot, LookSmart, Lycos, Magellan, Northern Light, PlanetSearch, search.com, Thunderstone, WebCrawler, What-U-Seek and Yahoo.