E-Mail This Article to a Friend TURF BATTLES A site to see BY CHRIS WRIGHT

When it comes to the Internet, you can get too much of a good thing. Bob, a New York Web developer, knows this all too well. In January of this year, a site that Bob recently launched began to enjoy the kind of success that can excite peptic disquiet in the savviest of Web technicians. "We got crushed, creamed," Bob says. "We had 50,000 simultaneous requests from India." Today, Bob’s site receives upward of a million hits a day. This sort of thing can happen when you dabble in online sex.

The site that Bob created — Booble.com — bills itself as "The Adult Search Engine." Strictly speaking, it’s meant as visual satire — "a one-liner." In its design, the site bears a striking resemblance to another, much larger search engine. "There are a few points we’re trying to make," Bob says. "One, the adult industry is very prevalent on the Internet, and Google is its big purveyor. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not talked about much. We captured some of the ideas of the Internet: intellectual property, humor, sex. One word — Booble — has captured that Zeitgeist."

The people at Google, meanwhile, are unimpressed. "This Domain Name is confusingly similar to the famous GOOGLE trademark," reads a recent cease-and-desist order from Google’s attorneys. "Your web site is a pornographic web site. Your web site improperly duplicates ..." and so on. "They have a right to object to people making fun of them," says Bob, "but the claim that we’re conning people or making a zillion dollars, it’s just not true. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that we will not be lining our pockets and going to Aruba."

What really gets the goat of the Google people is that Booble — parody or not — actually works. Granted, the site is more of a database than a search engine, and it has only 6000 links in its files, but, as Bob puts it, "I don’t know why anyone would need more than 6000 porn sites anyway." To find out how well Booble stacks up against Google, we typed three keywords into both engines:

"Bush"

Google: Welcome to the White House

Booble: Hirsute Beavers

"Dick"

Google: Dick Gephardt for President

Booble: Shocking Cocks

"S&P 500"

Google: Standard & Poor’s Index Alert

Booble: XXXcumWhores.com

Yep. However you look at it, Booble is taking a bite out of the lucrative online skin trade. Despite the attention paid to him by Google’s big-shot attorneys, however, Bob remains upbeat about the future of his site. "Right now it would be great if they would be aggressive and mean," he says. "That would help us, because that’s a part of the entertainment."