HOEI

Google Images got censored for being classified in the “Extreme, Pornography” category by SmartFilter. SmartFilter is a web filtering product from Secure Computing. The SmartFilter product helps network managers control what content their users access on the Internet. I work as a Tier III support engineer for 65 locations around the world that use this product to control the Internet access of tens of thousands of users. Today our help desk got a call that required me to determine why some users could no longer browse to images found in a search on Google Images. The users were being returned an error page telling them that the Goggle Images content was blocked form being categorized as “Extreme, Pornography”.
The redirect URL for all images on images.google.com begins with “http://images.google.com/imgres” and is followed by a question mark and eventually the URL of the site where the image is actually hosted.

I used the URL Checker on the SmartFilter web site to determine that the users were getting blocked because the categorization of the above mentioned Google URL. I contacted SmartFilter and they responded back telling me that this categorization was a mistake. As a result of my email they have since fixed to problem and now this Google Image URL is back to being categorized as a “Search Engines, Visual Search Engine”.

This issue today raised a question. Should Google images actually be filtered as adult, pornograhy, and/or extreme? The only thing keeping users from finding potentially offensive material is the default Google SafeSearch Filtering settings. Users are a radio button away from getting images from thousands of URLs that have not been categorized yet by filtering software like SmartFilter.