Everyone knows that there is a dark underbelly to the internet. Snuff films, violent sexual imagery, child porn - all sorts of depravity that, because of the unfettered freedom allowed on the internet, is difficult to censor and very hard to erase.

But in an historic partnership. Google and Microsoft have fine tuned their search engines to identify images and videos of child pornography and are making a concerted effort to banish such filth from the web.

Business Insider:

Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed in the Daily Mail this weekend, outlining changes being made to Google's search function in order to block child pornography.

Google has lots of plans to help fix this problem, notably, using humans to review each image to confirm the difference between abuse and what Schmidt called "innocent pictures of kids at bath time."

Schmidt writes:

We've fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.

While no algorithm is perfect - and Google cannot prevent pedophiles adding new images to the web - these changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids. 

Google will roll out changes on a global level in 150 different languages.

It's a start. And hopefully, the technology will continue to improve to the point where net search engines can virtually eliminate the smut. But as Schmidt points out, there is always going to be a way for pedophiles to share their depravity with others. What is to be hoped is that these criminals can be identified and prosecuted when they seek to spread their filth.