Google announced Friday that it would remove search results pointing to revenge porn, a switch of sorts for the search giant that generally is loath to remove search results.

According to Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of search:

Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results.

In a Friday blog post, Singhal said that "in the coming weeks" Google will publish a Web form for victims to make their removal requests.

"We know this won’t solve the problem of revenge porn—we aren’t able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves—but we hope that honoring people’s requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help," Singhal said.

The announcement comes days after a California man pleaded guilty to tricking women into giving up access to their Gmail accounts. The defendant would find nude pictures of the women in the mail and then sell the photos to the operator of the now-defunct revenge porn site IsAnyoneUp.com.