Google alters the way Image search handles adult content
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 12th Dec 2012 22:03 UTC
Google A change to anything related to Google Search - the product so many of us rely on - is never going to go by unnotoced. This time around, Google has altered Image Search for US users to alter the way it handles that ever so important aspect of the web - adult content.
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RE: Adult content?
by galvanash on Fri 14th Dec 2012 03:35 UTC in reply to "Adult content?"
galvanash
Member since:
2006-01-25

At what point does nudity become "adult content?"


I don't see any evidence that strict nudity is being filtered at all (even with safeSearch turned on). If I do a search for "breasts" I see lots of breasts for example - what I don't see are lots of screenies from porn movies. If I want to see those, I can search for "breasts porn" and get them. Same thing with most other body parts...

It has nothing to do with nudity, it is really about pornography.

I am asking this because, well, here in Finland nudity is not seen as a generally negative thing. Both adults and children often go to sauna together, for example, and this can include friends, too, not just family members.


While many people in the US are quite a bit more prudish about nudity, there is no denying that, I don't think this feature has anything to do with that. It is purely about culturally accepted norms (in the US anyway) - there is "tasteful" nudity and then there is porn... Most people would prefer that images that come from pornographic sites not be included in their searches when that isn't really what they were searching for in the first place.

It is a feature for the US engine after all - why shouldn't it be tailored to US sensibilities? Again - Google is not taking anything away - it is still indexed and still searchable, it's just been categorized a bit more strictly to make it harder to accidentally find it.

Why is the above even relevant? Well, because it seems there are people here who seem to think that being exposed to anything at all that generally lies underneath our clothing will make kids grow up wrong, and well, that's just inherently ignorant. Sure, straight up hardcore porn isn't possibly the most appropriate content for young eyes, but there is no good reason for removing all nudity from the 'net.


That is what bothers me about this discussion... People automatically jump to this assumption of the motivation for doing this - but that just isn't true here.

Google is not removing nudity from the internet. They are not even hiding it. They are making searching for it more explicit - i.e. a search for "penis" no longer gives you a bunch of porn pics - because maybe that really isn't what you want and since the porn pics outnumber the things that might actually be relevant by 1000 to 1, including all the porn actually makes searching less useful.

This is a technical solution to a technical problem. It makes searching for things that are NOT porn more effective - because the fact is that for every picture of the female anatomy that might be relevant to a student doing research, there are 100k or so porn pictures that will muddy up of the results. It is an improvement in the engine...

Yes, everyone uses the internet for finding porn. But it occasionally has other uses... ;)

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