Adult Content Filter

According to Yandex’s web crawler, the number of adult websites on the internet is not as impressive as might be expected – they total to only about 2.5% of all online resources. The promotion of these websites, however, is so aggressive that the users’ exposure to erotic material on these websites is highly disproportionate to their number. It’s hard to avoid this kind of content even if you are not looking for it. Internet pornography is a huge business even in those of its forms that do not offer direct access to adult content for money. Adult websites often distribute malware used for scamming or spamming. Since a porn site, understandably, cannot make money from advertising, it has to rely on other ways of monetizing, instead, including semi-legal or illegal ways of promotion. That is why adult websites can appear among search results for any kind of a search query, which is not even remotely erotic. Not only are these websites completely irrelevant to the user who never had any intention to find erotic or pornographic content, they can be quite shocking in their unexpectedness.
Yandex aims at providing relevant search results for every user including those who do not have any interest in adult content. By ‘adult content’ we mean the web pages, which any parent would not want their child to see before the child is old enough to make their own decision. Our view is that if the intent to find the adult content, and only this type of content, is not explicitly expressed by the user in their search query, there is no reason for a search engine to offer links to websites with this type of content. Those looking for [stories] or [videos] are not necessarily expecting to find pornographic material. Those who do want to see exactly this kind of content, however, can explicitly specify their interest in their search query.
The technologies for filtering adult content have successfully been implemented in a number of Yandex’s services including image search and search suggestions. Yandex filters adult websites from its search results for any queries that do not explicitly express the user’s intention to find pornographic content.
Filtering adult content from search results does not affect the indexing of websites with this kind of content. It does not alter, in any way, the ranking of these websites in search results, either, if these results are relevant to the search query. Such websites remain in the search engine’s index, they are simply not retrieved if the user’s query does not suggest an interest in the adult content. A website is quickly deleted from the index only when it shuts down (for legal or any other reasons). The adult content filter in Yandex Search is enabled by default. Those users who do not want, for whatever reason, to have any search restrictions can remove them by flagging the ‘do not filter’ option in Search Results Settings. Disabling this filter stops the search engine from filtering out adult web resources from search results.
Yandex also offers the family search filter. With this option enabled, the adult content will not appear in search results even in response to directly relevant queries like [porn]. Using the family search filter gives parents certainty that their children are protected from exposure to adult content on the internet.
Yandex’s search engine filters undesirable content in the form of websites, pages or images automatically. A web page is identified as ‘pornographic’ based on, first and foremost, the words and phrases it contains (including words in hyperlinks). There are many other factors used to diagnose adult content. If, for instance, a website has many pages with the adult content key words, chances are high that other pages on this website will also be filtered out from search results even if they do not contain such words. Other factors include images used on other websites already identified as pornographic, or hyperlinks leading to adult content websites, etc. Adult content filters offered by Yandex provide a reasonably safe protection from undesirable content in search results.
However, if you enabled the adult content filter on Yandex and can still see links to pages with adult content, please send their URLs to adult@yandex-team.ru. If the adult content filter excludes your website from search results even though it does not contain any adult content, please tell us about it using this form and we will try to fix this problem.