There was an article in the Deseret News that indicates Utahns may be googling for inappropriate content. This is no surprise, but the surprise might be that Utah ranks number one in the nation on Google Trends which normalizes the data. The article basically explores why a state that ranks number one in religious terms might also rank number one in inappropriate content search terms, implying that it is because we are expected to conform to certain standards and the internet provides an opportunity to break away from that conformity. Without a doubt, this explains some of it. But I think there is more to the story.

First, Utah does not even rank in the word "Porn," only pornography. Salt Lake City ranks number one in the world for "pornography addiction." This does not mean that it is the only place people have addictions, but of all google searches performed within SLC, has the highest average of people that are searching for information on it. That's a good thing. I buy keywords for my websites in Utah and Idaho on "pornography addiction" because I know people there that are searching for those terms are not actually searching for pornography, but rather for help with it. So, I guess you could say that it's the number one state trying to fight it. This does not explain why Utah ranks so highly on other terms, but that might be explained below.

On searches for nudity, strip tease, and strip poker, Utah ranked number one but did not have enough data to break down the amount of searches by city within the state. That means that the total amount of searches are not very many at all, but the amount of searches on Google dedicated to those terms are. And on the terms that do have enough volume to break down by city, Spanish Fork consistently ranks very high, often number one, as the cities within Utah for that term. Spanish Fork only has 20,000 people, so even for the search terms that do have enough data, it seems like the absolute numbers are not that high. Now, forty percent of Spanish Fork's population is under the age of 18, which is extremely high compared with the national average and even high compared with the Utah average. It would be interesting if the reason that Utah is ranking high in all of these is because Spanish Fork's teen population is particularly having a struggle with pornography. Spanish Fork was also the first city in Utah to provide high speed internet and cable television to its local businesses and residents.

When you take that into consideration along with the following, things start to look different. Utah is the state the ranks the highest for computers in the home, but along with Idaho has the greatest discrepancy of internet access in the home (source). That means that a lot of homes have computers, but no internet access. I imagine that this is for moral reasons. So the state is technologically advanced, but more prone to block all internet access. That means that you have a skewed demographic on the search engine. Those using the search engines are the ones not blocking the internet. If all of those homes that had computers also allowed the internet, the normalized data would be very different because they would be doing google searches on nicer terms. At least that's a possibility. It's also interesting to note that Utah ranks number one in internet, software, and computer, which isn't surprising considering that there are more computers per home in Utah than any other state and Utah Valley has one of the largest tech/startup industries on the west coast. Also, Spanish Fork is a part of the Utah Valley tech section.

With all of these tidbits of information combined, I think there might be more to the story than just Utah rankings showing a seedier side of the state. Just a possibility.