Google Made The SafeSearch Filter Update Faster

Historically, the Google SafeSearch filter, i.e. the filter that weeds out adult content from the search results, was very slow in removing the SafeSearch label for a site or specific portion of the site. John Mueller of Google said this Friday that Google’s team took efforts to make this faster.

John said at the 52:09 mark into this video that “we’ve taken some steps to make that faster” when talking about the SafeSearch filter being able to reclassify sites as not being adult oriented anymore.

In 2018, we reported that the adult filter reclassification process can take many months. Even a relatively new SafeSearch help document still says “if you recently made the changes, our classifiers may need more time to process them. It can take up to 2-3 months.”

I am not sure if it use to take six or more months and the 2-3 month timeframe is speeding it up or if Google can now reclassify things within days or weeks now?

Here is where John said this filter is now faster at updating:

Here is the transcript:

But if it was just purely that there was adult content there before then I could imagine that maybe our safe search filters are a little bit kind of slow in recognizing that. I do know we’ve taken some steps to make that faster, but maybe we need to make that even more faster. Or maybe there’s something else on the safe side as kind of sticking.

The safe search side is something that you can check if you do a site query and then turn save search on and off. You should be able to see is there something from safe search happening or not. You don’t see that with regards to indexing though so but I can take a look at this afterwards and we can see if there’s something super obvious that I can let you know about.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.