Kids can't legally use credit cards and so they can't pay the monthly fees for membership or merchandise. Sex may be the ultimate come-on, but cold cash is the goal of the adult business. Inducing minors to steal credit cards to satisfy their curiosity makes no sense, Carmona says. When illicit charges are discovered, the site owner takes the loss, crediting the account holder. This apparently has less to do with aggressive marketing of porn than with the public's unfamiliarity with the Web and the idiosyncrasies of search services.
Search engines comb through all the words in millions of Web pages.
Directories scan a smaller pool of material that its staff has categorized, reviewed and edited. Some sites, including Magellan, bill themselves as family sites that will not return sexually explicit material. Database searching is also an arcane skill for most people, especially those new to the Web. Yet the way a search is constructed can dramatically affect what sorts of results turn up. Many search engines sell banner ads and display different ads depending on the keywords in a visitor's search.