See An Offensive Image On Google? Stay Tuned.

Before the revamped Google Image Search design went live 9 days ago, there was a clear and quick way to report offensive images to Google. In fact, Google released the report offensive image feature just about a year ago, due to complaints. Now, that feature is no longer found in the new design.

Here is a picture of the old way to report offensive images in Google Image Search:

As you can see now, that “report offensive image” link is gone:

I asked Google about this and they made it sound like they simply forgot to put it in the new design. They didn’t say that, instead they said:

We’re still using the SafeSearch filter, set to “moderate” by default, to filter pornographic or offensive images from the search results.

Most of our SafeSearch filtering is done automatically — user reports just supplement that filter. While no filter is 100 percent accurate, we’re continuing to update SafeSearch to keep it as current and comprehensive as possible.

To your question — in the new UI we didn’t include the old reporting link; we’re working on a new way for users to report offensive images directly from the new image results grid. We don’t have a specific timeframe for that, but in the meantime, our webpage removal request tool is available as always to report offensive content that SafeSearch may have missed.

As you can see, they didn’t include the old link in the new design. They didn’t say why but they did say they are looking for a way to give users a way to report these images within the new search results grid. For now, they recommend using the page removal tool.

Many people claimed the old method never really worked, simply cause there are not enough resources monitoring the reported images.