Google plans to censor unauthorised nude photos from its influential internet search engine in a policy change aimed at cracking down on a malicious practice known as "revenge porn".
The new rules announced on Friday will allow people whose naked pictures have been posted on a website without their permission to ask Google to prevent links to the image from appearing in its search results.
A form for submitting the censorship requests to Google should be available within the next few weeks.
Google traditionally has resisted efforts to erase online content from its internet search engine, maintaining that its judgments about information and images should be limited to how relevant the material is to each person's query.
That libertarian approach helped establish Google as the world's most dominant search engine, processing roughly two-thirds of all online requests for information.
The Mountain View, California, company decided to make an exception with the unauthorised sharing of nude photos because those images are often posted by ex-spouses, partners in a broken romance or extortionists demanding ransoms to take down the pictures.
"Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims - predominantly women," Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice-president of search, wrote in a Friday blog post.
Google's stand against revenge porn won't necessarily purge it because not even the internet's most powerful company has the authority to order other sites to remove offensive or even illegal content.
But Google is hoping revenge porn will prove less mortifying to its intended victims by making it more difficult to find.
