The other day, while casually browsing the Internet (as I tend to do for long hours on end, while my boyfriend is playing Halo), I wound up at a Website that loosely called itself “ExploitedBlackTeens.com presents Da Dirty Ol’ Men, and the Black Teens That Love ‘Em.”

This was a little disconcerting to me, as I am neither an exploited black teen, nor a dirty old man. In fact, I would probably categorize myself as a neatly-reserved — perhaps sometimes foul-mouthed and unabashedly sexual — white teen girl.

How did I get to this site? I wondered. How did my normal porn routine lead me to a site that catered to neither my own person nor my interests?

It all started with Google.

Sick of “Sex and the City” and poor imitation columns (disappointingly, most college newspapers nowadays feature the token “innovative” sex columnist — or two), I realized that the cleverest of people skip the drama and annoying brats (as much as I love them) and just watch pornography.

However, if you’re like me, you’re a girl, and as such never felt the need to go searching for naked chicks online. Where was I to start?

Since Google is the supreme search engine of God, it stood to reason that if any greasy smut-peddler with a camera was showing pictures or films of people screwing each other online, Google was going to serve it to me on a silver platter. I meekly typed in the word “Pornography” (with the capital “P” and quotes, of course), expecting a gold mine of attractive people having sex with each other to magically manifest on my Powerbook. (Perhaps I would simply tab over to “Google Images” and have me a porn-fest?)

I was entirely wrong.

If you’ve ever done this, you’ll know that, ironically, typing in the word “Pornography” will give you results that make you feel dirtier than just typing in “Horny High School Cum Sluts.” At least if you were to type in the latter, you’d probably end up with what you were looking for — even though the images you’d come across would probably be neither titillating nor free.

On the other hand, the simple word “Pornography” yields such results as “Adult Sites Against Child Pornography” (a non-profit organization that works with the U.S. Customs Service and the FBI in enforcing anti-child pornography laws); “The Pornography Plague”; and “Strugglin’ With Pornography: A compilation of suggestions for battling pornography addiction.”

Great. Now I feel dirty in an incredibly ungratifying sort of way.

So, how does one go about finding porn — and, more importantly, good porn?

After much research (um … typing ‘Porn Reviews’ into Google) I stumbled across a lovely fellow named Sir Rodney and his filth-reviewing Website. I bring him up not because of the quality of his reviews (they usually suggest that you pay for porn, a commitment I’m not ready to make), but because of his suggestion of the best way to seek out porn: friends.

No, Rodney’s not suggesting you tape your friends having sex. “The first and best way to find an adult site is to get a recommendation from a knowledgeable and trusted friend,” Rodney advises. “On the other hand, do you really want to be the one to start a conversation that begins, ‘Gee, Bob, have you seen any good “cheerleader facial” sites lately?'”

Clearly, this is just not an option; asking your suitemate for a site recommendation might end up a lot more like the Google search for “Pornography” than for “Horny High School Sluts” (read: you will be treated like a pervert).

Nevertheless, I asked around — that’s right, I asked my friends what turns them on — leaving me in an abyss of options. While Sir Rodney referred me to search engines, amateur sites, and soft-core sites (i.e. the ever-lovely Playboy), friends referred me to more low-key methodologies in looking to get off.

But before diving in, I must warn you that it becomes necessary to set limits for one’s self. Your answers to certain questions will define the limits of where you go and how you come:

Am I willing to pay for porn? (No.)

Am I willing to download porn illegally? (Possibly … but not if ITS is looking over my shoulder.)

Am I willing to allow an unknown entity guide me through my pornographic experience? (Yes.)

Can I get off to ugly people? (No.)

If you are willing to download porn illegally, Kazaa or bit torrent applications or search engines (torrentspy.com: type in “porn” for a splendid assortment of categories) for short films are a good choice. And if you’re just looking for photos, this gallery offers good ones.

As for free porn, perhaps the most intriguing are thumbnail sites, where small images link you to a great many other pages — such as the beloved “Bang Bus,” the original reality porn website — and various others, via thumbnails (thumbnails are miniature links of the photo they’ll take you to which present neither the attractiveness of the person doing the act, nor the depravity of the act committed).

Thumbnails are easily capable of taking you places you most certainly do not want to go, and likewise, downloading porn videos might end up giving you films that just don’t satisfy you. In a lot of these free Internet resources, it’s hard to deny the fact that some of the girls and boys are just ugly.

These aren’t the days of Playboy, when everybody was beautiful, and could get you off without being completely naked or penetrated. Instead of controlling our orgasmic fate by flipping the page, we browse — not a dissimilar tactic, but one which leads to the uncensored and unglamorous industry of pornography.

Methods of finding porn in which you are not in total control of who and what you look at have the potential to lead you to the odd site or two that drops you off in an existential crisis and a re-evaluation of your decency as a human-being because of a sudden realization of exactly what you are witnessing (as did for me the “Grandpas on Ebonies” site) — but if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably a bad human anyway. I know I am. That’s why I clear my history frequently.

S. Zelda Roland is an angel in Link’s centerfold.