Google's John Mueller said that the search company does not have "objective metric for adultness." He said if you need to have some sort of direction on what Google Search would consider adult content that might be filtered by SafeSearch, use the content policies help document as a "rough classification" for that.
John said this on Twitter "There's no objective metric for "adultness". If you're doing this for SafeSearch, I'd use the rough classifications at... I don't know the details of News. For Search, small parts wouldn't skew the bigger picture."
Here are those tweets in context with Lily Ray's questions:
Some questions for @JohnMu / @dannysullivan :
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) November 1, 2021
How "adult" does "adult content" need to be to justify adding the meta tag?
Does informational (but perhaps graphic) content about sex & relationships fall into this category?
(1/2)
There's no objective metric for "adultness". If you're doing this for SafeSearch, I'd use the rough classifications at https://t.co/hvdqDjtMdE . I don't know the details of News. For Search, small parts wouldn't skew the bigger picture.
— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 1, 2021
The content policies help document defines sexual content as "content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Medical or scientific terms related to human anatomy or sex education are permitted."
I am not sure how helpful that is - but that is what John is saying would filter out content with Google's SafeSearch.
Danny Sullivan from Google responded as well:
That's designed to help us with SafeSearch, so I'd look to the page about SafeSearch for guidance: "Explicit results include sexually explicit content like pornography, violence, and gore."https://t.co/JD5AdoyBDf
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 2, 2021
So for now, I'd work to those definitions. We can take a look at perhaps adding more to our help area in the future.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 2, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
