The Supreme Court's decision in Miller v. California has brought about several criteria which determine whether a certain material is obscene or not. These include lack of artistic merit, being sexually focused, and offensiveness, but also needs to be compared with the contemporary community standards where the material was found or used.

Until now, this last point required painstaking research from lawyers which sought to prove that Americans in the area frequently consume porn and adult material. For example, in 2000 lawyers for a video store owner who rented and sold porn in Utah managed to obtain statistics for the subscriber rates for X-rated channels and frequency of pay-per-view pornography purchases in the area.

The statistics showed that the community was an avid consumer of porn and removing the porn-renting video store from the market wouldn't have made any real difference overall.

Now, a NYT story highlights the use of data obtained from Google which proves, similarly, that residents within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place, seek porn more than one would have thought. A pornographic Web site operator may be off the hook soon after his lawyers proved that his neighbors use Google more often to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon,” NYT reports.

The search data for Pensacola, Florida, was obtained from Google through a subpoena and is actually output of the company's Google Trends tool. The Google Trends tool has recently gained momentum, after being apparently abandoned for months at a time in 2006 and 2007. As part of its coming back, Google launched Google Hot Trends, which displays the top 100 hot searches of the past hour, whereas Google its parent shows the most popularly searched terms for a period of time between 2004 and present.