Machine learning meets porn: How we know which tubes and pictures are ‘straight’ and which are ‘gay’.

September 9th, 2012 by Aidan 1 comment »

One of the features of the new EveKnows.com is the ability to filter search results by sexual orientation. But with thousands of new galleries added every hour, how do we do this?

The answer is machine learning. Our search spider looks at the text of every gallery we index, along with the descriptions other sites use to link to those galleries. By starting with a small collection of galleries we know show “straight” content, and another collection of “gay” galleries, we can train a computer program to examine the gallery text and predict whether the pictures, tubes, or movies in the gallery are “straight” or “gay”. It’s the same approach Google uses to keep SPAM out of your Gmail inbox, and it works remarkably well. As some folks have noted, however, it’s not perfect. Yet.

The reason this technique is called “machine learning” rather than “machine prediction” is that our program continues to “learn” from new galleries that it indexes. So, over time, we’ll get better and better at distinguishing gay galleries from straight galleries. You might have noticed this over the past couple of weeks. Last week, our internal tests found about 50 straight picture galleries mistakenly classified as “gay” from a sample of 300 gay galleries. That’s about an 84% accuracy rate, which isn’t bad, but could definitely use some improvement. After continuing to learn all week, plus some algorithm changes we’ve made to help it along, today our spider misclassified only 6 galleries from another sample of 300. That means it was right 98% of the time!

With these sorts of improvements, we’re able to automatically index huge numbers of galleries every day, just like Google or Bing, without waiting for people to individually review each one. So, you get more free porn that’s accurately classified, helping you to find exactly what you’re looking for faster than ever before. It’s just one more of the ways we’re trying to make EveKnows become the world’s best porn search engine.

More tubes. Fewer ads. Meet the new Eve.

August 11th, 2012 by Aidan No comments »

Summer has been busy for us here at EveKnows. We’ve been rebuilding the EveKnows porn search engine from the ground-up, with support for more tube sites, more and bigger thumbnail previews, fewer advertisements, better search technology, and more advanced features. The result? Find exactly what you’re looking for, without any hassle.

A brief overview of what’s new:

  • More tubes. Now Eve can find results from all of the leading tube sites, with thumbnail previews of the entire clip.
  • Different views. We heard a lot of feedback when we switched from our Google-esque, traditional view to our modern thumbnail view. Now you can switch between them for the best of both worlds.
  • Find more like this. Our favorite new feature is the “More like this” link on every gallery. Our previous approach to finding similar galleries was simple, and usually didn’t return great results. Now we use advanced information retrieval techniques to determine exactly what sets certain galleries apart, and then search our collection for galleries sharing those features. We’re ecstatic with the results, and we think you will be, too.
  • Fewer ads. Running a popular website isn’t cheap, but we’ve been working hard to cut costs. The result: now we use less of our site for advertising, and more for showing you the porn tubes, pictures, and movies you’re looking for.
  • All the small things. Bigger thumbnails. Faster load times. Saving your preferences between visits. Improved RSS feeds. Sorting by popularity, tube duration, and more. We’ve been working to identify anything that could work a little bit better, then figuring out how to make it great.

We think you’ll love the new EveKnows. We’re proud of it, and can’t wait to hear what you think.

Search porn tubes with EveKnows 2.1

June 10th, 2012 by Aidan 3 comments »

After loads of feedback about the previous site redesign, and the increasing popularity of EveKnows Classic, we decided a revision of the last design was in order. Not only did we want to improve on what people liked about the site, we also wanted to add a long-requested feature: searchable tube movies! We’ve just started crawling the Internet for porn tubes, so expect these results to improve over the next month. What do you think of the changes to EveKnows?

A New Look for EveKnows!

November 15th, 2011 by Aidan 10 comments »

Hey all! This week we redesigned EveKnows, focusing on a picture-based presentation of search results instead of text. What do you think?

Slideshows For All!

February 19th, 2010 by Aidan 2 comments »

Let’s be honest… who wouldn’t want to be able to press a button and have every photo from a particular adult picture gallery automatically display on their computer, one after the other?  Picture galleries are always of a higher quality than movie galleries, but until now, manually clicking on each photo made pictures seem outdated next to the more modern movie and Flash video galleries. No longer!

Today Eveknows.com is proud to introduce a brand new Slideshow Viewer. As many of you have commented upon, the old, HTML-based slideshows no longer worked in the Safari web browser at all, and worked infrequently in Firefox 3. Unfortunately there was no way to fix the problem using HTML and JavaScript, but Adobe’s new AIR platform seemed to offer exactly the functionality we needed: it’s cross-platform, it integrates with every web browser, and it puts you in control of each slideshow.

The only catch is that now, you need to install our Adobe AIR application before viewing slideshows will work. Rest assured, the EveKnows.com Slideshow Viewer is safe, secure, and 100% free of adware and viruses. It’s also discreet; the application installs itself with the innocuous name Slideshow Viewer and only displays adult material after you’ve clicked one of the View Slideshow buttons next to EveKnows.com picture galleries.

So go ahead, check it out and let us know what you think!  We’ve worked hard on this application, and we think the attention to detail really shows. Hopefully you all enjoy it as much as we do!

Get the EveKnows.com Free Porn Slideshow Viewer

The EveKnows.com Slideshow Viewer in action!

EveKnows.com 1.8

November 21st, 2009 by Aidan No comments »

Today marks the first significant upgrade to EveKnows.com in over a year.  The site will still look the same, but should respond much faster and with better, far more recent results than previously. Gallery thumbnails are also larger and higher quality, and the Submit page accepts bulk gallery submissions.  If you’ve submitted galleries for indexing in the past few months, they should be showing up in the results now.  More updates will be coming to the design and functionality of the site soon!

Not Dead!

October 14th, 2009 by Aidan No comments »

Not much has changed on EveKnows.com recently, but I’m not dead! I’ve been working on a number of under-the-hood improvements, the first of which is being rolled out today. Caroline, the search spider that builds the EveKnows database, has been significantly upgraded to be faster, smarter about detecting galleries, and produce better thumbnails. The new galleries Caroline uncovers will be integrated into EveKnows over the coming months, but you can get a sneak-peek at them by checking out the Latest Galleries page.

This upgrade has been a long time in coming.  The previous version of Caroline didn’t scale well, so when EveKnows hit the 1,000,000 gallery mark, things started to slow down substantially.  This new version should make the site much more responsive.

For those of you who submit galleries, rest assured that they are being indexed, but they won’t appear in the search results until I adjust the website to work with the new version of Caroline.

Photo Slideshows Fixed

June 25th, 2008 by Aidan No comments »

Sorry for the recent slideshow outage. The bug has been fixed, so your XXX photo slideshows should be back in all their naked glory at EveKnows.com ;)

EveKnows 1.4 – Photo Slideshow!

February 10th, 2008 by Aidan No comments »

Today some very exciting features were added to everyone’s favorite porn search engine. I think the coolest by far is the new photo slideshow (more on that in a minute!), but here’s the full list so you can judge for yourself.

Quality of Results
The gallery ranking system was drastically overhauled and now offers significantly better results. A gallery’s date plays an important role in the new algorithm, so it should tend to keep fresh results near the top of the listings. It also helps to break up the tendency of ‘grouping’ search results, i.e. searching for ‘redhead’ would return lots of results from a single site, then a bunch of results from a different site, then results from a third, etc. Now the results will be mixed together much more appropriately.

More Thumbnails
New galleries will have three thumbnail images instead of only one, so you can get a better idea of whether the gallery contains the type of photo’s you’re interested in. Hover your mouse over the gallery and the thumbnail image will rotate, displaying each different photo for a few seconds. Please note that JavaScript must be enabled for this feature to work properly.

Photo Slideshow
New galleries now support a photographic slideshow of their images! Yes, that’s right: EveKnows automatically run through a complete slideshow of a gallery’s photos, all with a single click of your mouse! Not all galleries support this feature, and not all browsers are compatible with it. Notably, Safari will not be able to display most galleries as slideshows (although it does work with a few). Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera, however, all work properly. If a search result has an associated slideshow, you may view it by clicking the Slideshow link; galleries without slideshows will not have this link. If your web browser blocks pop-up windows, you will need to either press the ‘Play’ button to start the slideshow or turn of the pop-up blocker for EveKnows.com.

As always, feel free send me any comments or criticisms!

Search Suggestion Update

January 23rd, 2008 by Aidan No comments »

Today the EveKnows.com search suggestion module got an update. Previously it had been based on the words detected in galleries; while this seemed to make sense, it didn’t work out well in practice. I’m using aspell to handle the dictionary lookup, so words weren’t weighted based on their popularity. The new system still uses aspell, but it draws its dictionary from previous user queries. The basic premise here is that more people will search for the proper spelling of a porn star or phrase than for any particular misspelling, which will keep the desired results on top. If anyone notices any problems, please leave a comment explaining the issue.