Yahoo! search went downmarket yesterday, and defaulted to serving up porn to users.

Clicking on search result thumbnails led surfers to a image of a man and a woman copulating, no matter what initial search term was first requested.

The xxx image was served up around 200,000 times in the space of around 30 minutes on Tuesday night before Yahoo! stepped in and disabled its thumbnail feature as a temporary fix, Techcrunch reports.

The priapic problem reared its head when users followed thumbnails generated by general web searches. Yahoo!'s dedicated image search was not affected. Yahoo! web search is now back to its more modest normal state.

The glitch suspiciously coincided with a decision by the internet firm to make 600 staff (or 4 per cent of its workforce) redundant, prompting speculation that an outgoing worker left a very rude Easter egg. ®