Over 100,000 search terms and phrases will now show no results. It is hoped that the new move will protect more children in danger of abuse.
13,000 other search terms will return warnings from Google that the content they are searching for is illegal and point them towards help.
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said: ‘as important, we will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global.’
He continued: ‘while society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm.’
Google communications director Peter Barron spoke about the changes, saying: ‘We hope this will make a difference in the fight against this terrible crime.’
Earlier this year PM David Cameron spoke out about his intentions to curb access to online pornography and enforce legislation that would ban child abuse images from popular search engines.
The PM said: ‘there are some terms that are so shocking and unambiguous that I believe they should return nothing at all. It's not an infringement of free speech, it's responsible business practice.’
Some have said that despite the good intentions of the changes, it won’t make enough of a difference in how paedophiles operate on the internet.
The former head of the Child Exploitation and Protection Centre, Jim Gable, said that the move sadly won’t deter abuse: ‘they don't go on to Google to search for images. They go on to the dark corners of the internet on peer-to-peer websites.’
The new changes by Google and Microsoft have, however, received praise by most child campaigners, with an added reminder that many children are still at risk of being abused and that the battle against abuse still rages on.
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