With all the shouting that goes about whether Google really do stick to their “Do no evil” slogan its nice to see that the power house is teaming up with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to utilise the technology it created in filtering copyright material on YouTube to help catch scumbags who create child porn and exploit children.

The program uses pattern recognition to enable analysts to sort and identify files containing child sex abuse.

“The program uses pattern recognition and will work even if the pattern has been modified,” explained technology analyst Larry Magid.

“So if police can identify a pattern such as a calendar on the wall or a t-shirt logo, they have a much better chance of finding the exploited child and catching the suspect.”

Google engineers and scientists were able to work on the project on what the company calls “20% time”, which allows all employees to dedicate that amount of time to projects they initiate.

This is a great step forward in trying to protect children from exploitation on the Internet and hopefully the technology can be further developed to be even more effective.