Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Google Images no longer allows you to turn safe search off

Google Images in the US (aka, only the .com version) no longer allows users to turn the safe search off.  This will most likely be implemented on the other Google sites soon.
Might not seem like a big deal, but the thing is that even with"Filter explicit results" turned off, you will still only get the same results as the old "Moderate" filtering. Basically it now looks like this:
Old Strict filtering = New filtering with "Filter explicit results" turned on.
Old Moderate filtering = New filtering with "Filter explicit results" turned off.
Old filtering off = No longer exists.

You can get porn and other content like that if you use a very porn related term, but if you use some of the more vague (for example most fetishes) for image searching then you won't get any nudes.

Why did they do this? I honestly have no idea. I can't think of a single reason why they would do this. Basically what they did was remove the option to turn filtering off.

Here is a very Not Safe For Work image if you want to see a comparison. I censored some of the images because they were too lewd.
Here is a link to the comparison on imgur