Google SafeSearch Showing XXX Picture - Or it did, at least

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The all-knowing and all-algorithm writing Google has failed utterly in what it has been bragging to do so well: keeping children from having access to pornographic material. Their SafeSearch option missed a very explicit photo of a woman’s vagina, and, as beautiful as it might be or not, there was no reason for it to show on top of the web search results, where the Google Universal Search returns are shown.

The image was there no matter what filter was checked in the Preferences page, even the one that was supposed to block both explicit text and explicit pictures wouldn’t change anything. The query I’m talking about is "hot celebrities," but unfortunately I wasn’t able to capture a screenshot of the results, I was too busy changing the filters back and forth. In the meanwhile, Google either dropped the image from its index or just modified its algorithm for the better, but you can still see their goof-up on The Blog Bryn blog, here.

This comes just after Google responded to the founder of the world’s biggest pornographic movie producer that by its filters and every other action it does, the children are being kept away from the explicit material. I guess they were wrong, and if memory serves me right, I can remember two other cases when the Mountain View based company was involved in similar scandals. The images back then were on Google News, and related to a story entitled "Employee of the Month": Big-box banality. In that situation, the image was removed and even now there’s no picture attached to the article on the Seattle Times’ online edition.

Feel free to try the query that caused the trouble, you will now find that instead of the vagina photo, there’s one of Michelle Anderson, that’s much more… viewable, to say the least.