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Shelve this in adults only

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE
Published September 27, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG — Searching online for the St. Petersburg Public Library?

Get ready to blush when you find “Bra Babes.” And a promise of “a great selection of amateur girls in bras and lingerie.’’ Try backing out hastily and you’ll find it’s not that easy.

The folks at St. Petersburg City Hall were stunned when they were told people could Google the library’s former Internet address, st-petersburg-library.org, and find a site offering “1000’s of sexy women and teens wearing bras and exposing all.’’

For the past three years, the library has been telling people about its new Internet address, www.splibraries.org. But it also held on to the old one — until July.

That’s when pornographers snapped it up.

Other organizations have been similarly embarrassed. In 2002, people who tried to get to one of Gov. Jeb Bush’s Web sites ended up at a hard-core pornography site instead. It turned out a company grabbed the site address when its registration expired.

That same year, Juniata  College in Huntingdon, Pa., found out that a Web site with an address close to theirs was offering “The Best Sex on the Net.” The pornography site was owned by a company with a Seminole post office address.

Muslim Gadiwalla, St. Petersburg’s chief information officer, and Elaine Birkinshaw, manager of library special projects, said neither knew about the old library site’s link to pornography until a St. Petersburg Times reporter told them about it.

They said they’ve had no complaints, only a few calls from people who said their bookmarked site no longer worked.

Birkinshaw said the library changed to the new site three years ago. “That’s much easier than the old one. That’s why we changed it. It used to have hyphens and by the time you finished giving it to someone, they’ve fallen asleep.’’

No such problem now.

Gadiwalla said the city has tried to protect its Web address by buying variations of its name. “What we’ve done, we’ve taken about eight or 10 of the most common permutations,’’ he said. Because there’s a cost for each name, there’s just so many the city can buy, he said. “We can’t just go out and buy all of them,’’ he said.

Gadiwalla said Wednesday the city has asked Google to remove the link.

Deborah Vance, assistant professor of communication at McDaniel College outside Baltimore, said there are companies that buy domain names like the old St. Petersburg library address.

“It’s common practice for people to buy up domain names and then to sell them,’’ she said. “For a pornographic site, it could be lucrative. They probably feel they could sell it back and make some money to get them to relinquish it.’’

And there’s a benefit to buying a Web address that is already established, said Liz Mulig, professor of accounting at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. “There’s already people going to it, so it’s already getting hits. There are companies that what they do is buy old, abandoned Web sites.’’

Like SnapNames. “We help people get a domain name they would like to have that is currently registered, in the event it becomes available,’’ said Mason Cole, vice president of the Portland, Ore., company.

Would SnapNames have any problem selling a St. Petersburg Library Web site to a pornographer? “For good and bad, anybody can put any kind of content on any domain they want. That’s the world we live in,’’ Mason said.

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Waveney Ann Moore can be reached at wmoore@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2283.

[Last modified September 27, 2006, 21:51:08]