SEARCH MARKETING BLOG

Disturbing Google Universal Image Result

About 6 months ago, Searchengineland.com did a piece about how Google Image Universal Search was no longer family friendly, with an illustration of how a search for "raccoon" brought up an image of a raccoon and a dog being rather….. inappropriate?

Matt Cutts later said that the Google Image team had dealt with the issue.

Well, when searching for some clients keywords earlier this week, I think that I found an example, that is frankly worse – I searched for "office chair" on Google.com and was greeted with:

Censored Office Chair Image

As Vertical Leap is a family friendly organisation, I have taken the decision to censor the most "offensive" part of the image in question, but you can surely see why I was so surprised by the "illustration".

I checked the other major search engines, and saw no sign of this image, so perhaps this has been optimised specifically to appear in Google.

The painting in question is called "office chair", but perhaps this shouldn’t appear with SafeSearch enabled?