Google and Microsoft have decided to take strong measures against online child pornography considering the alarming rate at which photos and videos containing child pornography are proliferating on the Internet with plans to introduce measures to block child abuse images and videos from their search results.
Around 100,000 search terms leading to child sex abuse images and videos will now return no results and show a warning which says child abuse imagery is illegal. The restriction, which is as of now applicable for only English-speaking countries, will in the next few months be expanded to other 150 languages as well.
This step against child pornography has been praised and welcomed by UK Prime Minister David Cameron who had earlier in July asked Google and Microsoft’s Bing to prevent and restrict people getting access to child abuse images.
With an aim to eradicate online child pornography, both the search engine giants have come up with new algorithms that that will prevent such illegal searches.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, in an interview with Daily Mail said “These changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids.”
“As important, we will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global”, he added.
“We’re now showing warnings – from both Google and charities – at the top of our search results for more than 13,000 queries. These alerts make clear that child sexual abuse is illegal and offer advice on where to get help”, he said further.
Microsoft has also assured that it will not tolerate any kind of child abuse content and will work closely with Google on this issue with its search engine Bing showing clean results.
