When free porn pictures showed up in my Yahoo Images Search

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Sat, 04/09/2005 - 2:40pm.

Last weekend the Pope was struggling to hold on and I was thinking about the time we saw him in St. Louis. I wanted to see if someone had a picture of the Pope in his Pope mobile while he was in the St. Louis Convention Center. I typically use Google Images for all my image searches, but I've been trying to use Yahoo! Image Search lately. I figure Google can't get around to updating their images enough to make it fresh, but Yahoo! does. What I found was surprising.

When I went to Yahoo Image Search and typed in "Pope St. Louis" I was surprised to see a porn thumbnail. I did the search again just to make sure and sure enough, there was a porn thumbnail. Here is a screenshot with the thumbnail blurred:

I thought it might have been a Yahoo Bomb or something, so I went to the next pages. I found another one on the third pages of results:

At this point I am dumb struck. My normal browser is Firefox, so I tried the same search in Internet Explorer and didn't see the porn thumbnail, so I decided it must be my cache in Firefox. Somehow a porn picture must have gotten in there. I cleaned out my cache in Firefox and tried it again. Same results. In fact, here is a screenshot showing the image coming directly from Yahoo! and the cache clean:

I thought maybe an extension I downloaded was causing the issue, so I went to another PC that has a clean Firefox install with no extensions. I use this PC for testing how my sites look in 800x600 and 1024x768 in various browsers. When I pulled the search up I received the same porn thumbnails.

I thought I'd drop a blog entry on this, but I wanted to let someone at Yahoo know before I did. Maybe they could explain it or possibly fix the issue. Yahoo! isn't the easiest company in the world to contact. I finally found a link in Yahoo! News and used it. I filed it under Bug/service problems. I know Yahoo! News wasn't the best place, but there is no link from the Yahoo! Image Search page to contact Yahoo!.

I also dropped a note to Jeremy Zawodny using his email address on his blog. I included all the screenshots and even apologized for the fact they included illicit images. To be sure he could contact me I left my Yahoo IM ID.

A week has passed and I haven't heard anything from Yahoo!. I think they received the report since the search comes up clean now.

The question still remains ... what happened? What caused the thumbnail issue and what was done to resolve it?

(I have the original thumbnails saved with the filenames Yahoo! gave them on the results page. The filenames were 1600617288.jpg and 1600651797.jpg. I felt it wasn't appropriate to post them here, but I can make them available to Yahoo! if needed.)