Google and Microsoft have agreed to eradicate online child abuse images in days to come. Google and Microsoft Bing search engines, which account for more than 95 percent of online search traffic, will block around 100,000 search terms that previously displayed child abuse content. Also, a warning will be triggered even if the images displayed of child abuse are legal.
Back in July, British Prime Minister David Cameron had called on the technology giants and had asked them to do the needful.
A team of 200 Google employees is working on cracking down on online child porn. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said at a recent event that the company was working on a software that will detect porn in its video sharing site YouTube and block it. The software is currently being tested internally.
"We're agreed that child sexual imagery is a case apart, it's illegal everywhere in the world, there's a consensus on that. It's absolutely right that we identify this stuff, we remove it and we report it to the authorities," said Google communications director Peter Barron. The changes will roll out in around 150 languages and the effects are expected to be truly global.
Microsoft is also working closely with Google to clean its search engine Bing.
"Day-to-day we're fierce competitors, and we collaborate on this issue because it transcends that," said Microsoft's general manager of marketing and operations Nicola Hodson. "It will be much harder to find that content on both Bing and Google. We are blocking content, removing content and helping people to find the right content or also sources of help should they need that."
