In their mid-1990s heyday, sex-related topics accounted for 17 per cent of web searches, but that figure has shrunk to an unsexy 3.8 per cent, Queensland University of Technology's Professor Amanda Spinks said.

But Prof Spinks said business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, had outstripped sex to make 30 per cent of web searches.

Her research in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University analysed up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile.

After business and e-commerce came people, travel, places, computers and the internet, health, education, then entertainment, the study found.

The research focused predominantly on web searching in the US and Europe.

Prof Spinks said there were multiple reasons behind the fall of sex-related topics from the top spot.

"It could be the favourites are bookmarked or an overwhelming increase in people looking for information," Prof Spinks said.

"More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.

"The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 1990s."

She said an explosion of information available on the internet had influenced the trend.

"Back in the 1990s, there wasn't as much business information on the web," Prof Spinks said.

"Only with the dot-com boom in the late 90s have a lot of people begun putting more information up and because the content changed people became a lot more aware there were other things they could find."

Her studies showed the average Australian search session comprised two or three words per query and two or three queries each session.

"While the average time spent searching is creeping up, a lot of people search for less than a minute," Prof Spinks said.

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