The internet is a woman's medium

I've recently come across a paper entitled ‘Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures’ [1], which reports that in the late 90s some reputed feminists, such as Sherry Thurkle, regarded the Internet as a woman's medium, in the convinction that

one needs an ethic of community, consensus and communication on the Internet and this is what [..] women are particularly good at[2]

The author of the paper challenged this claim with a simple and yet powerful observation. By running a search of the term "girl" on the main search engines, she noticed how the majority of the results were related to porn or other information which clearly targeted a male audience.

My little experiment
The paper was published in 2000, which in "Internet years" is almost prehistory.
Therefore, I've decided to rerun the same experiment in order to find out if this is still the case.
Here's a summary of the results for the first page:
Google.co.uk : wikipedia, a girl club, flickr photos tagged with 'girl', thank girl (a famous comic book with a female heroine), a magazine for girls, girl scouts and even a blog from a girl geek!
Yahoo: the two top results are for Amazon products tagged with 'girl' and a dating site, but then we get girl led sites, like "Girls Only", "A Girl's World", "SmartGirl.org".
It looks all very positive, both search engines have come up with loads of info targeting girls and no porn was found in the first page of the results.
Then I run the search with the Italian translation of girl, "ragazza", on Google.it. The majority of the results in this case regarded crimes against girls, followed by three sites for males (one porn site and two with advices on how to pull girls). Apart from wikipedia, only one 'girl' site was returned (RagazzaModerna.it).

What is the verdict?
From the results above, we can clearly see that there has been a huge improvement since Zoonen's search, at least in the UK. Both Google and Yahoo UK return almost for all the results in the first page, sites which target girls and most of them are not commercial and girl led.
A quick look to the Italian version though of Google, showed another picture: here the focus was on crime and sex, with only one site explicitly directed to girls.
Maybe this means that there aren't as many girl users in Italy or even if there are, they are not very "techy", they don't write blogs or give visibility to their associations through websites.
However, the shift from the preponderance of porn material to girl related/led informative material, suggests that the young Internet population has a strong presence of female users and this presence is changing the Net to acknowledge and reflect their values.

References
[1] Zoonen, Van L. (2002), "Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures", in European Journal of Communication, 2002, 17,5, p.9-10.
[2] Turkle, S. (2005), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, in Zoonen, Van L. , "Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures", in European Journal of Communication, 2002, 17,5, p.9.