Google News, Inside.

Porn Now Part of Universal Search

Posted at 8:32am EST on 09/21/2009

Universal search is a great part of Google. It gives users depth when they are searching, providing results for latest news items, image results, video results, and of course, the basic web results.

Up until today, I had seen everything was clear of porn…but it seems that has changed.

Looking at the screenshot below, you can clearly see that they are now displaying porn as part of the search results.

My search settings are set to “moderate filtering” so I would expect it to filter out any porn. When I bumped up the setting to “strict filtering,” the results changed to no video results at all, only web results. But, one thing I did notice, even with strict filtering on, it still displayed that porn video as a search result — simply without the thumbnail which it originally had shown.

Here are the results from what I can see.

I have a feeling it’s a just a breakdown in the porn filter and that there’s no greater underlying issue at hand, but could definitely be an exploit for porn sites to be using in the mean time until Google fixes it.

This is not the first time we’ve seen Google be a little bias towards porn. We saw Google think that porn is family friendly and we saw it also some porn pop-up in the news.