Tony Comstock, head of Comstock Films, has nothing but good things to say about
Google after he recently discovered hits to his site - where the company
generates most all of his business - had nearly petered out.
"All of a sudden, my Web traffic went almost down to zero," he told The Post,
saying the drop in traffic had resulted in an 85 percent decline in sales. The
business - which has a "Real People, Real Life, Real Sex" tag line - certainly
couldn't go on if this continued for much longer.
Across the country, unknown to Comstock at the time, several Google tech geeks
were undertaking a regular tweaking of the Web giant's algorithm, trying to
keep so-called sex-spam from deviant sites - and their crippling viruses - away
from unsuspecting Web surfers.
With a few keyboard strokes, the Google geeks sent Comstock from being the
second or third hit on a Google search of "real sex" to being several pages
deep on such a search.
Customers couldn't find him anymore, Comstock realized. "The Internet is the
last place where adults can discuss sex freely," he says. "It is our
distribution channel."
So the filmmaker shot Google an e-mail, and the search giant's Web-spam head,
Matt Cutts, responded to Comstock the day of the traffic drop.
The two began a correspondence and, within a week, the search problem was
largely resolved. Cutts admitted to Comstock, according to e-mail reviewed by
The Post, that "distinguishing between the 'good porn' sites and the 'regular
porn' sites is a hard problem."
With the algorithm re-tweaked, business firmed up again.
