The question I’m raising is whether, in parallel, it will be generally helpful to have more transparency about what we might call the infrastructure of popularity. Banning a hate site is problematic for a bunch of reasons, one of them being that if that site is popular, its popularity is telling us something we might want to understand better — and could with more data.

Because Picasa (Google) are hosting the photographs themselves they feel/(are) more responsible for the content. Though I’ve not checked, I’m guessing they explicitly specify in the terms of service what content they feel is appropriate for Picasa users to publish.

Google search and Picasa are clearly different products with different purposes and uses. Users may be more likely to browse Picasa for content, rather than search explicitly. A search request heuristically tends to mirror intention, where as browsing behaviour tends be more ephemeral. If a user searches explicitly for something, they usually want what they’re looking for (unless of course, you want to stay in a Hilton hotel in Paris). Consequently they are less likely to be surprised by what they find.

There are no universally recognised “terms of service” for the Internet. Filtering search results effectively puts them in a position of being an arbiter for what’s allowed on the web. This is obviously a position they need to be very careful about adopting.

Having a “inappropriate content” button on search pages would doubtless expose their ranking algorithms to easier gaming.

Many Google properties such as Blogger, Picassa and youtube were acquisitions, so in many ways it is not surprising that there are differences.

Does the distinction here arise solely through the terms of service?

Whilst these and many more reasons might be used to justify the different approaches between their products, it is interesting to note that there is a different attitude. Will this prevail; or will we see
a unified approach to the problem across the board?

I’d argue that a slight modification of the ‘disputed page’ idea could work for Picasa, providing of course that the content is legal and there are no awkward copyright issues (nasty-grams). Indeed this
approach is used by the other Google owned site, youtube. The youtube community flag potentially offensive videos as such. Users stumbling across such content are warned and are then required to login and
verify their age. It seems that the suggested strategy could form the basis of Googles censorship stance across the board, though questions of abuse and fairness will always arise.