Google & Microsoft Agree To Block Child Sexual Abuse Material From Search Results

The Mail Online reports Google and Microsoft Bing have adjusted their search results to block child pornography and other child sexual abuse content from being accessible through their search engines.

The news is being widely covered, some claiming that over a 100,000 unique searches and keywords have been blocked from showing up in the search results.

Microsoft has already been issuing warnings for such queries in the UK and other countries but this is now being expanded beyond the UK, to all English language search results and then hopefully many more languages in the near future. Google says they will expand it to over 150 languages worldwide, plus they will show an additional warning for 13,000 queries.

Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt said:

We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.

Google and Microsoft will also work on a plan to tackle sharing this type of illegal content on networks with the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation.

Google spokesman Peter Barron said: ‘The sexual abuse of children ruins young lives. It’s why we proactively remove these awful images from our services – and report offenders to the authorities. But the Government is right that our industry can do more. So we’ve developed new technology to detect and remove videos of abuse, as well as fine-tuned our search engine to prevent this material from appearing in our results. ‘We hope this will make a difference in the fight against the sexual exploitation of kids.’

For more details, see Techmeme.