August 26th, 2007GOOGLE SAFESEARCH HAS BLOCKED MY IMAGES
GOOGLE SAFESEARCH HAS BLOCKED MY IMAGES FROM GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH
I used to get a LOT of daily visits from users finding my images in Google Search, but not anymore! =-(
Visit your Google Search preferences and disable SAFESEARCH. Look for “SafeSearch Filtering” and set it to “Do not filter my search results.”
Now goto Google Image Search and search for “site:xarj.net“. This command shows all the webpages or images indexed by google for a specific website.
You will get 69 results (photos). Look through the pictures, there is absolutly no adult material AT ALL. I have a few celebrity photos but no nudes, no erotics, nothing sexual.
Now return to your Google Search preferences and enable SAFESEARCH. Look for “SafeSearch Filtering” and set it to “Use moderate filtering (Filter explicit images only - default behavior)”
Return to Google Image Search and search for “site:xarj.net”
You’ll notice all the images have disappeared from the SERP and this message appears :
“Your search - site:xarj.net - did not match any documents.”
From this simple experiment, we can conclude that google considers the photos on my personal blog www.xarj.net as inappropriate for children and kids. Obviously i do not agree with Google’s decision to block my images with the safesearch feature turned on. So i have sent Google a message about this issue. I hope they could react to it but nothing is more certain. I’ll keep you posted.
If you do the same experiment but with the regular Google Search (not Image Search), you can see 345 pages from my blog are indexed. You can try enabling or disabling SafeSearch, the results stay the same. So Google doesn’t have a problem with my website and webpages, just with my images. Strange…
More Information :
A Hardvard student wrote : “Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch”
CNET News wrote : “Google’s chastity belt too tight”
Any comments? Has the same happened to your site?
———————
Update : Monday, August 27 i received an answer from Google Help :
Hi Arnaud,
thank you for your note. We have passed your email on to our engineering
team for further investigation. We appreciate your taking the time to
write to us.
Regards,
The Google Team
***** They sound like real nice people! :=) And pretty quick to answer. Let’s see if they do anything about my problem.
———————
Update : Monday, September 17
The miracle happened! My images are NO LONGER BLOCKED by SAFESEARCH!!!
Read the FULL Article : My Blog’s Traffic has Exploded!
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May 8th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Good blog you have. Please can you send me infos how you contacted google about safe search results. I also have more then a 100 images filtered by safe search?
I follow your link but don’t know which option to use, it seems that non of these are fit?
Please if you can reply at my e-mail or here on this comments.
Thanks.
May 8th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Hey Crni!
Your blog http://thecontaminated.com/ has 13 images not blocked by safesearch and 131 images when google SafeSearch is deactivated. That’s a lot! You do not have any rated images, I guess Google Image doesn’t like picture of Spider bites!
Try to send a message to Google through this url : http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?ctx=contactpolicy&hl=en
and select the option : “Report a problem” then “Inappropriate or irrelevant search results”
The good news is that Google fixed my problem within a couple weeks after I sent my message to them!
Good Luck!
May 8th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Thank you Xarj, I thought that this is the page for contacting them.
I will let you know what they answered to me, but I think that they will need few days to answer on it as usually.
June 30th, 2008 at 8:06 am
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