Google makes it more difficult to stumble onto porn
Google tweaked its image search algorithm to make it more difficult to stumble upon pornography and other sexually-explicit photos.
CNET reports the world's leading search engine made the changes Wednesday night. The biggest changes can be noticed when using the "SafeSearch" option in settings. But in a Reddit threat Thursday morning, some users said images were blocked even with "SafeSearch" turned off
The changes led to an explosion of complaints online about censorship and users demanded explanation from Google.
A Google representative to CNET said they weren't blocking content, but users now have to be more explicit about what they want to find. For example, adding "porn" to a search term would probably help.
"We are not censoring any adult content, and we want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them," a Google representative said in a statement to CNET. "
CBS Seattle affiliate KSTW-TV reports that a pop-up warning also appears if Google detects a user is searching for explicit content for the first time.
"We've simplified SafeSearch setting on image search and the new default behaves similarly to what most users had as the default previously," A Google spokeswoman said, according to KSTW-TV.
Still, comments online blasted the search engine for the changes. One person commented on CNET, "Oh great, now I have to explicitly state what I am looking for, which then gets saved to my search history so I can't pretend I just stumbled on it."