Google Tweak Stops 'Lesbian' Searches From Returning So Much Porn

Google has tweaked its search algorithm to reduce the amount of porn that shows up when individuals seek out lesbian content.

The change came after a French website began reporting on the prevalence of pornographic images showing up under the search engine's Pride banner in June when users typed the term "lesbian" into the search bar. Numeramareported that in searches on the French version of Google shortly before July 18, searches for the word lesbian exclusively pulled up pornographic images (presuming a "Safe Search" filter blocking porn was not in use).

Engineers with Google and related companies in the past have struggled with machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms over-prioritizing connections with terms; such problems were cited when YouTube in 2017 started blocking often-benign LGBTQ content with its Restricted Mode filters.

In this case, that means AI systems see frequent searches for "lesbian porn," and ultimately associate the search term "lesbian" with pornography, even if many or most individuals searching strictly for lesbian content don't want to see graphic imagery returned.

But following reporting on Numerama and a social media campaign led by the Twitter account @SEO_lesbienne, Google appears to have made changes to the algorithm.

Numerama reports that Pandy Nayak, Google's vice president of search engine quality, addressed the search issues at a June press conference when the outlet posed a question about questionable search results.

"I find that these results are terrible, there is no doubt about it," he said. "We are aware that there are problems like this, in many languages and different researches. We have developed algorithms to improve this research, one after the other."

He noted the search engine in the past has seen disproportionate returns in the past with such search terms as "girl" and "teen." Engineers have addressed the issue by manually changing the algorithms and instructing them not to presume users searching for these terms want pornography.

While an image search on the French search engine is not devoid of porn, no graphic images show up in the first page of results when searching the term "lesbienne" or "lesbian."