It may not be quite what Steve Jobs had in mind, but a search engine called Guba is set to offer vast amounts of pornography and other video files, specifically tailored for Apple’s new iPods.
Guba is a subscription-only search engine that culls video files from the Usenet newsgroups, a huge repository of online content — much of it adult, pirated or both.
Beginning this month, Guba will convert video files from Usenet into the format used by the iPod, known as H.264. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched the video-enabled iPod last month along with deals to sell downloadable music videos and TV shows.
Although Guba offers up a wide variety of video, from the satirical news program The Daily Show to Japanese animation, its “erotica” section is likely to be the biggest draw.
“We can kid ourselves, but in the end it’s probably porn that people want,” said Guba chief executive Thomas McInerney. He noted that the site offers a “safe mode” to filter out adult content.
Usenet predates the World Wide Web by more than a decade, and it has developed alongside more mainstream file-sharing networks like Kazaa and BitTorrent.
Guba specifically searches through Usenet’s multimedia content, which is not indexed by popular search engines such as Yahoo or Google. It also converts video into standard formats, and lets users stream small versions from its website.
At a time when movie studios are hyper-vigilant about online piracy, Guba’s easily accessible videos could raise hackles among Hollywood’s content owners.
By Adam Pasick
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