Finally, a sensible use of Google Trends: A defense attorney in Pensacola is using the local volume data on pornography searches to establish the classic “contemporary community standards” yardstick for defining obscenity.

Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit magazines and movies available locally. A better barometer, [First Amendment Lawyers Association's Jeffrey] Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics, because they show what people consume in private. But that information is hard to obtain.

“All you had to go on is what was available for public consumption, and that was a very crude tool,” Mr. Douglas said. “The prospect of having measurement of Internet traffic brings a more objective component than we’ve ever seen before.”…

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” [defense lawyer Lawrence] Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

There’s a joke in there, somewhere, about the age-old linkage between porn and the Web finally moving beyond mere prurient interests. But I’ll let others zing that one.

The larger question: Does the average citizen think closed-door activities are subject to application as broader social mores? Of course not. It looks to me like the defense wants to force this issue by using (somewhat) hard data to erase the hypocrisy in maintaining public vs. private standards. It’ll take more than a search engine to knock down that moral construct.