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Google to clean up searches on child sexual abuse with Microsoft’s aid

Jamie Feltham
November 18, 2013

Google has announced that it is to clean up it’s search engine in relation to child sexual abuse searches. Results for subjects related to child pornography are to be cut away at to make sure results are safe. Microsoft is even pitching in with its picture detection tech seen in Bing. The result should be a cleaner, safer Google.

As Google’s Eric Schmidt explained to the Daily Mail: “We’ve listened. We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results€¦ While no algorithm is perfect ‘ and Google cannot prevent paedophiles adding new images to the web – these changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids€¦ But as David Cameron said in a speech this summer there’s always more that can be done.”

It sounds as if this is more of a first step than anything else, but it’s good to see Schmidt and co reacting to this issue. Prime Minister David Cameron also explained that he thinks more needs to be done. Hopefully we’ll see even more advances in the coming months.

Source: Daily Mail

About the Author

Jamie Feltham

Videogamer, music listener, squash player, exerciser, technology journalister. Multimedia journalism graduate, writing for the What Mobile mag and website

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