Google Inside

According to an official Google blog post today, Google will be working with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help build custom tailored software to their needs. Official partnership? Sort of. Let’s just say it has to do with that 70/20/10 work schedule.

Here’s a brief exerpt from Shurneet Baluhja, a research scientist for Google.

So we went into overdrive. I recruited some fellow engineers to help me build tools that NCMEC might find useful. Throughout 2007, using our 20% time, we created innovative software tools to help NCMEC track down child predators through video and image search. With these tools, analysts will be able to more quickly and easily search NCMEC’s large information systems to sort and identify files that contain images of child pornography. In addition, a new video tool we built streamlines analysts’ review of video snippets.

The keys here were organization, scalability, and search. In particular, the tools we provided will aid in organizing and indexing NCMEC’s information so that analysts can both deal with new images and videos more efficiently and also reference historical material more effectively. We hope the tools we’ve built for NCMEC will help its analysts make the important and often time-sensitive work of investigating child predators faster and more efficient.

Bottom line, Googlers have been quite active at creating applications that actually help the greater good of the world. While Google has been an invaluable asset to the Internet and making it incredibly easy to find things, we also have to realize that it makes it incredibly easy for anyone to find anything.

That also means those creeps too, finding and exploiting children.

The advent of the Internet has unfortunately provided child predators with a new avenue to exploit children. In August 2006, we joined NCMEC’s Technology Coalition Against Child Pornography, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop solutions that hinder predators’ ability to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography.

Googlers know about this problem and are helping fight back by using their time, that Google happily pays for — the 20%, to create something that can help combat this issue.