Google, Microsoft, Yahoo unite against child abuse images

Leading search engines Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have united in an agreement to block images of child abuse online; with Google saying today that as many as 100,000 search terms that may lead to such material will now return no results and instead trigger warnings that child abuse imagery is illegal.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said companies like Google and Yahoo had "come a long way", but the promise must be delivered or he would bring forward new legislation.

The UK Prime Minister is soon due to announce a series of measures to tackle the problem at a cyber-summit in Downing Street.

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt announced that a 200-strong team has cleaned up Google Search to target 100,000 terms that can be used to locate child sexual abuse images. The changes will soon apply to more than 150 languages. The company is also showing warnings at the top of its search results for 13,000 queries.

The search engines may do their best to clean up the internet; but child protection experts warn that most images are on hidden networks.

Both Google and Microsoft's 'Bing' have introduced new algorithms that will prevent searches for child abuse imagery from delivering results.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said, "These changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids.

"As important, we will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global."

The restrictions will be launched in the UK first, before being expanded to 158 other languages in the next six months.

Google communications director Peter Barron said, "We hope this will make a difference in the fight against this terrible crime."

Microsoft, which in a rare display of unity is working closely with Google on this issue, says Bing will also produce clean results.

The company said it had always had a zero tolerance attitude to child sexual abuse content and had been putting in place stronger processes to prevent access since the summer.

Later today, the two companies will join other internet firms at Downing Street for the Internet Safety Summit to be chaired by Cameron.