A new and unexpected legal application has been found for Google: helping judges determine the meaning of the word obscene.

The defendant in an obscenity trial in Florida will use publicly available search data from Google to show that people are more likely to search for terms like "orgy" than "apple pie" or "watermelon".

Clinton McCowen, who runs a pornographic website based in Florida will argue that, because Google users show more interest in sexual subjects than many topics considered "mainstream", the material on his site should not be deemed obscene.

Mr McCowen's lawyer said that jurors would routinely condemn material that they themselves consumed in private, and that Google's search data would give a sense of "how people really think and feel and act in their own homes."

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"We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values," Lawrence Walters, who is defending Mr McCowen, told The New York Times. "What is more American than apple pie?" Yet data that anybody could access through Google's new Trends service showed that "people are at least as interested in group sex as they are in apple pie," he said.

The Florida state prosector in the case, which will be heard on July 1, said that just because people used Google to search for sex-related topics did not mean that data could be used as evidence for a community's values.

"How many times you do something doesn't necessarily speak to standards," Russ Edgar, said. He added that he was still assessing whether he would try to block the use of the search data.

The defence case may also run into difficulties in that the data, which is gleaned from an experimental service called Google Trends, does not show how many people searched for terms - only their relative popularity over time. The service shows that in Pensacola, a city in north west Florida, "orgy" was a less popular search term than "surfing" and "Nintendo".

Mr Walters said he had served Google with a subpoena requesting more specific data, for instance the number of searches for particular, sex-related topics by local residents. Google said it was reviewing the request.

Mr McCowen faces charges of creating and distributing obscene material via a Florida-based website. The legal test for what constitutes obscenity was established by a 1973 decision of the US Supreme Court, and will typically be based on whether the material is offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex.

Courts in turn decide such questions with reference to "contemporary community standards".

Lawyers have typically made arguments about "community standards" by reference to the types of goods that are on sale - for instance sexually explicit magazines, but Google's search data opened a whole new body of evidence by revealing what people did in the privacy of their homes, legal experts said.

“The prospect of having measurement of internet traffic brings a more objective component than we’ve ever seen before," Jeffrey J. Douglas, chairman emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, told The New York Times.

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