Very Explicit Porn Hits Google Universal Search

Warning, clicking on the following Google search result may return an image of extreme pornographic nature. The image is of a woman's vagina and is found on a pornographic site, but the image appears to be hosted on Google's Blogger network.

The search phrase is a common search in Google Web search for hot celebrities (warning, there may be an image that you don't want to see or don't want your kids to see). The image comes up at the top of the page, above the organic results, in the top universal search spot. I will not share a complete screen shot, but I will share a very censored version (just so it is documented), if you really want a full screen shot, go to this blog.

I have notified several of my contacts at Google before writing this post but told them I would blog it.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at March 19, 2008 6:50 AM Comments (8)

Comments

How rude!

Posted by gabs at March 19, 2008 07:35

I thought maybe this only showed up if you had Safe Search off, but it also shows up if you are on Moderate Safe Search.

If you go to Strict, all Image results are removed from the search.

There is a HUGE difference in the image results if you are on Strict, Moderate or Off.

Posted by Chris at March 19, 2008 09:16

Well, yea, plus you dont have to go to image search - it is a normal google web search that triggers it.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at March 19, 2008 10:12

Right, but if you have strict safe search enabled then no images appear in the universal search at all. The thing is, this is exactly the kind of thing that Moderate Safe Search is supposed to catch:

Google's SafeSearch blocks web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results.
* Use strict filtering (Filter both explicit text and explicit images)
* Use moderate filtering (Filter explicit images only - default behavior)
* Do not filter my search results.

Also, I am betting that they will manually tweak this one result as opposed to removing all images in Universal Search until this is fixed, which means that there very well could be more of this for other phrases in the near future.

Posted by Michael VanDeMar at March 19, 2008 10:55

In any event, this is far from "moderate" anyway...

Posted by Barry Schwartz at March 19, 2008 11:07

It's on its way out.

Posted by Matt Cutts at March 19, 2008 13:37

Hi guys, thanks for looking into this. Since i originally found the problem and reported it on my blog the story has been all around and hopefully will now force people at google to take a closer look at the problems with safesearch. Bryn

Posted by Bryn at March 19, 2008 18:21

If you search for "knuckles" you get a picture that is kinda inappropriate too. A threesome. How do you report something like that?

Posted by puddintank at April 22, 2008 21:32

Very Explicit Porn Hits Google Universal Search

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