LONDON: Google and Microsoft have agreed to help block child pornography by ensuring that up to 100,000 search terms no longer return any results.
Following pressure from UK Prime Minister David Cameron, the search engine giants will prevent Internet users from looking up thousands of terms. When a user searches for one of the banned terms, they will receive a notice reminding them that child abuse imagery is illegal.
The two companies have also agreed to work with the UK's National Crime Agency and Internet Watch Foundation to target networks that host child-abuse material.
Writing in Monday's edition of the UK's Daily Mail newspaper, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that “while society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm.”
“That's why Internet companies like Google and Microsoft have been working with law enforcement for years to stop pedophiles [from] sharing illegal pictures on the Web,” he said. “But as David Cameron said in a speech this summer, there's always more that can be done. We've listened, and in the last three months, put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem.”
Schmidt added that Google plans to roll out the algorithm changes in 150 languages in the next six months.
In June, Google pledged $7 million to organizations involved in the fight against online child-abuse images after coming under pressure to do more to block access to child pornography.
The UK's four largest Internet service providers – Virgin Media, TalkTalk, BSkyB, and BT – also contributed a combined £1 million to help the Internet Watch Foundation root out online child abuse.
This story originally appeared on the website of Marketing.
