Last week, I was surprised to find an image of a woman in a thong within a Google search ad. I asked Google if such ads were acceptable, and Google told me they were. These images came from product extensions that were showing up in the search results for a while now. Apparently, Google reviews images to make sure they are family safe and if they are not, they are removed. Google told me, “Images in ads are only classified as non-family safe when they are found to contain adult content.”

Google has created a help page specifically to address preventing seeing such images in your ads. The page explains what I summarized above:

AdWords specialists review all of the ads that appear on Google and the Google Network. Ads are categorized as ‘Family Safe,’ ‘Non-Family Safe,’ or ‘Adult,’ depending on the content of the ad and website. Google does not permit ads that are classified as ‘Non-Family Safe’ or ‘Adult’ to appear for users who have activated their SafeSearch filter.

This obviously raises some questions. By default, SafeSearch is on when using Google Image Search. But what about when using standard web search? Are the images in the ads covered by the same settings? Google also doesn’t describe what line you have to cross for an image to be considered an “adult image.”

At the same time, these product images are being pulled from the Google Base (Merchant Center) export from the vendor. They then are dynamically displayed on ads that Google deems relevant. I was not sure how Google found a woman with a thong to be relevant for my search, which was for a company’s logo (i.e. compucall logo). Clearly, Google thought the search was for [college logo] or something like that.

Postscript: I asked Google for clarification on what constitutes an adult image. They sent me a link to more information on this topic at their ad policy page. Unfortunately, the page is not specific enough about thongs in the ads or not.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Images

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz