Google And Microsoft Come Together To Remove 100,000 Child Sex Abuse Results

The modifications will prevent more than 100,000 search terms from generating results that link to images and videos associated with child sex abuse and instead trigger a warning that the associated content is illegal.

In response to the alarming proliferation of photos and videos containing child pornography on the Internet, Web search giants Google and Microsoft plan to introduce measures to block the content from their search results.

The restrictions, which apply to English-speaking countries, will be expanded to more than 150 languages in the next six months, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote in an article for the Daily Mail on Sunday.

"We've listened, and in the last three months put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem," Schmidt wrote. "We've fine-tuned Google search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results."

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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. As important, we will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global.

As deterrence, Google is 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.

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As detection and removal, Google says, "there's no quick technical fix when it comes to detecting child sexual abuse imagery. This is because computers can't reliably distinguish between innocent pictures of kids at bathtime and genuine abuse. So we always need to have a person review the images."

Once that is done – and we know the pictures are illegal – each image is given a unique digital fingerprint.

"This enables our computers to identify those pictures whenever they appear on our systems. And Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology.
But paedophiles are increasingly filming their crimes. So our engineers at YouTube have created a new technology to identify these videos."

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"We're already testing it at Google, and in the new year we hope to make it available to other internet companies and child safety organisations."

Google announced plans in June to build a database of child porn images that can be shared with other tech companies, law enforcement, and charities around the world, allowing for greater collaboration toward content removal.

In addition to joining the Technology Coalition, which looks at how technology can be used to end child exploitation, the search giant has also donated millions of dollars to nonprofit organizations that work for the cause.

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Microsoft has also actively battled child pornography on the Web. The software giant helped develop the hashing technology for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's PhotoDNA program. The technology is also used by other Internet companies, including Facebook.

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