SAN BRUNO, CA — What if they held a “Porn Day” on YouTube.com and nobody invited the porn industry? Apparently it would look like it did yesterday, when pranksters decided to flood the site with pirated X-rated video clips in an attempt to overwhelm the search results. According to ArsTechnica.com, the culprits appear to be members of 4chan and eBaum’s World, who banded together to swamp YouTube. Although their target date was May 20th, some of the jokers couldn’t control their urges and began uploading content on the previous afternoon.

Because the clips contained no information to indicate that they were sexually explicit, unsuspecting site visitors were able to click on them, watch 20 – 30 seconds of non-sexual content – and then get a big surprise.

Once YouTube officials realized what was happening, they began pulling down the unauthorized content, but Ars Technica indicated that some still lingers and others remain in search results, sometimes with thumbnail images.

Scott Rubin of Google explained that “It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site. Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable.”

That assurance has done nothing to comfort some YouTube visitors, however, especially those with children.

Aiding YouTube in removing the unacceptable content has been a bit of coding laziness on the part of the uploaders, who re-used an assortment of tags previously attached during similar attacks. Those include the 4chan favorite “marblecake,” as well as “jonas brothers.” Further aiding in the search and destroy mission was many uploader’s egos, which compelled them to boast about their achievement in forums.