NSFW Pics On Google News

13 August 2008 97 views View Comments

Written by: teqedge

For the readers who have been living under a rock on Mars, Google has a news service. Google News pulls together the most popular news stories from a vast number of sources and legitimate news organizations. In other words the process is software driven and works well most of the time. I happened to catch one of the rare occasions when a not so mild image slips through the cracks on to Google News portal.

The screenshot pretty clearly shows what happened. The story regarding breast cancer was showing a thumbnail of nude female breasts. This was right about 10:15PM EST. When the story refreshed it was showing a different image. To add to the weirdness of the moment Google news portal was showing a different story on prostrate cancer with a hand going up someone’s behind. This is not such great news for Google, as the search giant had a major Gmail outage yesterday. I guess too many Google engineers looked away from the Google News portal to see what was happening with Gmail. To make a long story short 2 back to back thumbnail images of female breasts and a man (probably a doctor) with his hand up a fake plastic (thank God) ass. The screenshot is below – click to see a magnified picture.

Google News show boobs and ass

I have not been able to reproduce the problem any more. Refreshing the page has produced new, non-NSFW thumbnails for both news articles. Oh well! It was fun while it lasted.