Google recently announced that it will be making it really easy for kids, teens, and caretakers to remove images of themselves from its search result page if they become unexpectedly available on the internet.
The company has in fact provided a number of ways by which users can control their content on its search engine while also implementing the new policy that will take young individuals’ privacy to the next level.
This way, images will not appear in the Images tab or as thumbnails in any other Google Search feature.
In order to request the removal of an image, the user will first visit the policy help page where Google lists a number of information that will be needed on the removal requests form.
If you want to do this, you can basically start by filling out the request form and you’ll be required to provide information such as the image’s URLs, any search results pages containing the images, and even the search query terms used to locate the images.
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The request will then be reviewed by a team at Google after the submission request and the user will be notified by the search engine giant about what step was taken on the request.
Google points out that removing images from Google Search does not remove them from the internet.
Since Google is almost like the starting point for any internet user, this makes it the number 1 most visited website on the web with billions of active searches queries being made daily.
Even though Google has 100% control over its search result pages, it obviously has no control over millions of other websites across the internet.
And since Google is merely a search engine, it doesn’t outright host images but basically links to them which is why the first step to taking down images is by first reaching out to the original website or websites where the image/images are posted.
And even though Google has over 60% of the search engine market, there are certainly hundreds of other search engine services such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
“We believe this change will help give young people more control over their digital footprint and where their images can be found on Search,” Google says.
