How Google Tackled Its Early Porn Problem

Ten years ago, the web was honeycombed with porn infiltrating search results at the most unexpected times--a problem Google had to face developing a spam-free search engine.

In his new book In The Plex, author Steven Levy describes the method Google used to rid itself of early porn spammers. Though engineer Matt Cutts developed SafeSearch in 2000, a product to filter pornography from search, some sites still slipped the block.

So how did Google deal with the unwanted naked spam?

"Google asked Cutts how he felt about porn," writes Levy. "He'd have to see a lot of it to produce a system to filter it out of Google."

Though Cutts tried to get his co-workers to help him find porn sites to filter, they were simply too busy. So he upped the ante. After complaining to his wife that "No one will help me look for porn!" she volunteered to bake chocolate chip cookies for those that found porn that escape Cutts' filter.

And so, Look for Porn day was born, catered by the cookies of Cutt's wife.

"She's still known as the porn cookie lady at Google," he recalls in the book.

Big porn sites were accepting of the move--they didn't want 12-year-old girls stumbling into their pleasure palaces accidentally, either. But other porn sites took it as a challenge and found ways to game the system and up their page rankings.

"It was an eye-opening moment," Cutts said. "Page-Rank and link analysis may be spam-resistant, but nothing is spam-proof."

It was an early example of a phenomenon representing a new and more complicated problem for Google: the use of Search Engine Optimization in artificially boosting page rank. That issue is one Google still grapples with today.

Comments

[JackTheSkipper]

10:05 PM on 04/17/2011

Porn industry has been at the forefront of all technologies.

[rafaelrobyns]

10:09 PM on 04/17/2011

Talk is cheap. Back your claims.

[trojoe]

01:49 PM on 04/18/2011

Porn is the reason we went from beta to VHS. Then from VHS to DVD. Now DVD to bluray. 3D porn has been supporting 3d tv sales. Porn is why the Internet exploded. When it first began, yes, it was useful... But few people knew how useful. Once people realized there were free naked men and woman on the Internet, suddenly everyone had a reason to use the Internet and become familiar with it.

[ramblingjohnny]

06:56 AM on 04/17/2011

Funny the safe search filter is the first thing most peoples disable when visiting google! All that work...

[ghee99]

02:42 PM on 04/15/2011

whats the big deal?

just use image recognition software that can recognize human body parts (i.e. sex organs)
then use a word filter program that catches sex words

websites that have sex words and sex organ pics on them are most likely pornography

and then google, or whoever, can just filter them out

no big deal to do, really

[Dalton Perry]

03:51 PM on 04/15/2011

Sex words? Thats throwing a pretty big net and also easy to circumvent. Image recognition is even less reliable and easier to circumvent. How would you even create a program to do that? Programmers can't even create image recognition software to recognize words used in Captchas, let alone body parts. This is no easy feat.

[ghee99]

04:33 PM on 04/15/2011

sure it is (easy)

even simple programs like iPhoto can recognize the faces of all the people you take pics of

plus, sites that use words like (i'm gonna use soind-alikes, but you'll get the point)
tets, clock, passy, etc are almost gonna be 100 percent pornography sites

so, as i said, pretty simple to do

no big deal at all

plus, sites that are just text, pr mostly text
can be excluded

and just focus on the sites that are almost all pictures and videos

easy-breazy

[detoustain]

05:55 PM on 04/20/2011

Being in the image recognition biz, I can confirm that content filtering is difficult but not impossible. One thing that's not too tough to implement and works very well is "blacklisting," which means detecting and blocking images from a known database of inappropriate content. Much trickier is detecting images that *might* be explicit/porn, based on specific algorithms for that. You invariably get false negatives and positives so while image recog software can accelerate the filtering process, a combination of software + human moderation is usually the best way to go.

[Wilkby]

02:24 PM on 04/15/2011

"Big porn sites were accepting of the move--they didn't want 12-year-old girls stumbling into their pleasure palaces accidentally, either."
12-year old boys, on the other hand...
(No pun intended by the reference to the hand.)

[victorsays]

01:56 PM on 04/15/2011

So Google tactle porn buy giving me baked cookies? Nice... Seriously, this website is a shithole

[ghee99]

02:43 PM on 04/15/2011

ha ha
agreed
at least THIS article was a joke

[rafaelrobyns]

10:14 PM on 04/17/2011

What's the use of complaining about an article that gave some information you decided wasn't worth knowing? Is this how you spend your life?

[Danek Greori]

01:00 PM on 04/15/2011

Why would someone write an article telling us everything EXCEPT the information that is most relevant to the story itself. This is the literary equivalent to a very vague movie trailer.

[MsVella]

11:49 AM on 04/15/2011

What kind of article is this?

Aren't you going to actually tell us how it was done?

[D-blings]

11:57 AM on 04/15/2011

They don't release that information. If they did, then the spammers could more easily maneuver around it.

[MsVella]

12:21 PM on 04/15/2011

Well then its a pretty useless article.

[Republicrat1776]

12:24 PM on 04/15/2011

chocolate chip cookies, apparently....

[armaniexch]

11:49 AM on 04/15/2011

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[P51MUSTANG]

11:44 AM on 04/15/2011

There should be an annual contest for the most innocent search terms which bring up porn results.

[Republicrat1776]

12:25 PM on 04/15/2011

I would offer "santorum," but that term was far from innocent even in its original context....

[VerizonCells]

11:43 AM on 04/15/2011

In the 90's I worked in the adult online industry for about 10 years, I ran a few of my own pay-sites and then sold them and took a job at Hustler Online, I now work for mainstream companies, little has really changed with rankings, it is still possible with hard work and experience to get top listed.

[jeremyemilio]

03:27 PM on 04/15/2011

Really? So howcome out of all those sites out there only ten of them ever manage to be in the top ten at any given time? You'd think if it was that easy there'd be like a million top ten sites for every search term. Or am I missing something?

... or are you?

[VerizonCells]

08:56 PM on 04/15/2011

No I am not missing anything at all, I have many business sites and all come up on first page Google searches, like i said with lots of hard work....

[Dahveed1]

11:31 AM on 04/15/2011

Porn and cookies - and they get paid to do this search? You could get a bunch of pervs to do this for just the porn and cookies, but their definition of what's objectionable might be lacking...

[OnAndOnSOH]

02:56 PM on 04/15/2011

Not to mention their math skills...

[Miiiike]

10:11 AM on 04/15/2011

My young niece likes horses. Care to see what pops up when you google 'girls' and 'horses'? I have nothing against porn, but this is ridiculous!

[jamalc]

10:56 AM on 04/15/2011

Turn the safe search up a few notches. That should help.

[Taymullah]

11:09 AM on 04/15/2011

Really Miiiike, I think you are ridiculous.

Learn how to surf the internet and how to use a search engine and adjust settings. Do not blame Google for you inept search engine skills. On moderate some things will slip through, change it to strict (you know where it should be for kids) Nothing get's through.

[Tysto]

11:41 AM on 04/15/2011

I'll never forget when my niece came over (back when I had hi-speed and they still had dial-up) to research "slavery".

[Miiiike]

10:17 PM on 04/15/2011

Tay- I know perfectly well how to use the internet. My point is that porn is so pervasive it can appear where someone doesn't expect it. I don't really care if my google searches inadvertently lead to porn. But somewhere as I write this, some little girl or boy is looking for info about horses and finding pictures of women having sex with them. And that is indeed ridiculous.
You however, are presumptuous.

[CountLeo]

10:10 AM on 04/15/2011

Sweet. Private innovation and gamesmanship wins the day. So much nicer than seeing Lindsay Graham rail about the evils of the internet and present his plan to make us all safe again...

[falco]

09:52 AM on 04/15/2011

"I'll tie a transmission to my head if it will get Dick to chase me".

[dandan1]

09:46 AM on 04/15/2011

Google video results still spam porn on the past week option.