Google blocking links to suspected child porn from search results

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company is actively removing links to suspected child porn.

In an open letter published by the Daily Mail, Schmidt said a team of 200 Google staffers have been working with a new technology to prevent links to child porn from appearing on the company’s search engine.

“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,” Schmidt said.

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Aside from cleaning the results for those queries, Schmidt said Google will also display warnings on 13,000 other queries that could be related to child porn. Those warnings will remind users that child sexual abuse is illegal and the warnings will also advice users on how to get help.

To do this, Schmidt said Google has people going through pictures to see if they are truly child porn or if they are something innocent like a child taking a bath. Schmidt said the company is able to do this with the help of a picture detection technology developed by Microsoft.

Besides photos, Schmidt said Google’s YouTube engineers have also created a new technology to identify videos that could be considered child porn. Google is testing that technology.

The former Google CEO said the changes in the company’s search engine will soon roll out in more than 150 languages.

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