The following is an interview with Aidan Trent of EveKnows. EveKnows is a true Porn 2.0 search engine in every sense of the word. We talk about Aidan’s porn search engine algorithm and his future outlook for EveKnows.
EroEvo: First, we’d like to know more about the genius behind this revolutionary porn search engine. Can you give us a brief bio and discuss your background in software development?
Aidan: I wouldn’t say EveKnows is a revolutionary adult search engine so much as an evolution in porn search technology. My background is in software usability, so with EveKnows I’ve tried to take the best elements of various search engines and cobble them together in a way that makes them intuitive for people to work with. I have a degree in Computer Science and a love for making computers easier to interact with; in fact, easing human-computer interaction has been my goal since the late ’90s. EveKnows is something of an experiment, in that regard. It seeks to create a friendly, easy-to-use, free porn site that anyone can use without fear of viruses or other malicious software.
EroEvo: Your search engine is named Eve and your crawler is named Caroline. Is there a significance behind these names?
Aidan: I like the idea of personalizing software, which is why the site has a human name in the title. The selection of ‘Eve’ over other names was mostly because I’d recently watched ‘All About Eve’ and thought it sounded cool. ‘Caroline’ actually does have some significance; it derives from Caroline of Brandenburg-Anspach, who corresponded with Leibniz in the early 18th century. Yes, I’m something of a history nerd.
EroEvo: From what I’ve seen so far, EveKnows is the best porn search engine on the internet. What gave you the idea to start the monumental task of creating a web 2.0 porn search engine?
Aidan: Thank you! Search technology has interested me for a while, but the success of Google has, I believe, rendered other general-purpose search engines redundant. Thus, I wanted to create a niche search engine. I ended up picking porn searching because it seemed under-served and the adult industry has historically had a reputation for being a dark, unfriendly corner of the Internet. Attempting to create a site that was friendly, inviting, and intuitive, given those constraints, seemed like a neat challenge. Of course, it also helped that at the time, I had no idea how much work would be involved. 
EroEvo: It seems that you programmed EveKnows in Perl. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Perl for a search engine, and would you recommend it for others?
Aidan: The website interface and search spider are both written in Perl. Perl was designed for easy text processing, which makes it uniquely suited for search engines. The actual search engine back-end is written in C for fairly obvious optimization reasons. That language combination has worked very well for me, but I’m sure you could use other languages with equal success. PHP or Ruby could have been used for the interface, and the spider could easily have been written in just about any scripting language that includes HTTP support.
EroEvo: What is the biggest challenge in creating an algorithm for a porn search engine?
Aidan: Without a doubt, the biggest problem is categorizing each gallery. Users are interested in the photos and movies, but I can only efficiently index text. If the text isn’t accurate, the search results will be very poor. It took a while to find an appropriate way of balancing incoming text links, gallery titles, and embedded gallery text to give accurate search results.
A similar problem is keeping malicious web sites out of the search results. At its simplest, that could mean rejecting any galleries with iframes or scripting; this approach, however, ended up in missing a lot of safe galleries that used JavaScript for mouse-overs and such. Finding a metric for judging the safeness of a site’s JavaScript was a pretty challenging task.
EroEvo: Without any pay-for-placement links in the results, how do you plan on generating enough revenue with EveKnows to make a profit?
Aidan: There are banner advertisements beside the search results and sponsored text links below the ‘Popular Searches’ section of the main page. Obviously I don’t want to throw too many ads on the site, and this formula seems to strike a decent balance between keeping the site clean and keeping the server funded. I believe it’s incredibly important to not risk the integrity of the search results, so pay-for-placement can never be an option.
EroEvo: What is your future outlook (near and far) for EveKnows?
Aidan: I’m always playing around with the code. Usually that means adjustments to Caroline so that she finds better galleries, which results in better searches. In the longer term, I’m working on adding the ability to search more types of media than just photos and video clips.
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