World-Renowned For Porn, Google Cracks Down

In response to claims that Google isn't doing enough to combat the darker side of pornography, the porn channel—sorry, search engine—has spent this month vowing to crack down on it.

Responding to a wave of criticism that the multi-gazillion-dollar company donated a mere $35,000 to UK-based porn watchdog Internet Watch Foundation (that's about 90 seconds-worth of profit in Google-time), Google has rushed to make amends. The company is now moving to rapidly donate a million dollars to the scheme, and is pledging additional millions to create a database to cut down on child porn. In perhaps the most shocking news here, Google is also now forbidding its bloggers (on the relatively unpopular Google platform Blogger) to profit from pornography ads at all.

Yahoo, meanwhile, has essentially confirmed that its blog-platform acquisition, Tumblr, can pick up the porn-ads Google doesn't want.

"Let Tumblr be Tumblr," Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyar said Monday in regard to content that was not "brand safe." (Is that what we're calling it now?)

Google also announced it will invest $5 million towards "hashing" technology, which marks each image of child porn with a "blueprint" that allows it to be tracked down, and then removed, across the Internet.

On Thursday, Google sent out forceful messages to all of its blog sites hosting "adult" content warning them that the company's policies have changed, and that pornographic ads will no longer be tolerated. "I didn't know Blogger was used for anything other than porn," remarked one commentator.