After banning sexually explicit terms from its advertising networks earlier this year, Google Inc. followed up this week with a warning to advertisers who were not complying with the new terms. The move has some wondering whether the Internet-dominating company plans to eradicate porn from its main search business as well.
“This is another example of a mainstream company turning its back on the industry that has supported it,” attorney Michael Fattorosi, whose firm often represents the adult industry, told CNBC. “The question now becomes: Will they block adult content from their search results?”
Despite the change in ad policy, Google is not planning to remove porn and other adult content from its search engine entirely, according to Dr. James Jansen. The Penn State professor researches search engines and online marketing, and said the policy change more likely stems from Google’s ads shifting from text-based to ones that incorporate pictures.
“Some of these pornographic sites have been AdWords customers for a while. But if you look back at 2002, when it was mainly textual ads, it probably didn’t offend a lot of people,” Jansen told International Business Times. “Now that they’ve integrated images, those ads are much more prevalent. That may be facilitating the change.”
What hypocrites these guys are. Any image search using the right terms will turn up hundreds of hardcore images with no firewall, 2257 compliance or warning of any kind. There’s no way to limit searches by age. The management at Google knows this and clearly has no intention of doing anything about it. They’re just redecorating a little by discriminating agains one class of advertisers to avoid closer scrutiny of their larger operations.