INTERNET giant Google has announced it will take action against revenge porn by accepting, for the first time, complaints from victims and removing images from its search results.

In a post on the company’s public policy blog, Google Search senior vice president Amit Singhal says the “problem” of revenge porn cannot be solved but can be eased through changes to its patented search engine.

“Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims - predominately women,” Mr Singhal said.

“So going forward, we’ll honour requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results.”

This week, The Advertiser revealed more than 400 Adelaide women and teenagers had been exposed by a US-based website that had made their nude photos - both revenge porn and stolen - online.

Many of those affected, including football legend Graham Cornes’ daughter, Amy, have reported the matter to SA Police, who are investigating.

The user who posted the images claims they “cannot be stopped” because the site is based overseas, but police say Australians who supply images to the site can and will be arrested.

The database of images has since spread to three other websites and expanded to include faked and Photoshopped images of a pornographic nature.

Yesterday, Channel Seven’s Sunrise program apologised for “victim blaming” those affected in a Facebook post that failed to consider the fact the images had been stolen and posted without permission.

In his post, Mr Singhal said revenge porn seeks to publicly humiliate people or, in some cases, extort money from them in exchange for the images being removed.

He said Google believed its search engine “should reflect the whole web”, and therefore removing images on request was an appropriate thing to do.

“This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive (personal) information that may surface in our search results,” he said.

He said Google would, in the coming weeks, publish an online submission form through which victims could request the images be removed from search results.