It’s been a long day writing out reports for clients. Taking a break (!) I opened my feedreader and was was curious to find a rising trend “nikki catsouras decapitated” on Google Trends – no idea who she was so I popped over to Google Trends to see what the fuss was about:

I was NOT interested in seeing the images of the poor girl, but I was interested in seeing if Google Image Search did indeed deliver the ‘goods’ to this rising wave of obviously too-curious-for-their-own-good searchers.

Eyes squinted to avoid seeing any carnage, I searched for the girl’s name.

I was kind of shocked to see, that even with Google STRICT SAFE SEARCH on, you can still see the grisly car accident photos leaked to the press by scumbags if you search for JUST HER NAME on Google Image Search. I took a screenshot but wouldn’t dare post them here or even link to a source.

Surely it wouldn’t be that much of a hassle for Google to remove these images, and clean up the SERPS for this and related terms and give a much more sanitised SERP, promoting sites like this Nikki Catsouras page and help the family out a little. Maybe Matt Cutts knows a bod at Images.

According to Newsweek magazine, the Catsouras “accident was so gruesome the coroner wouldn’t allow her parents to identify their daughter’s body.” However, photographs of the scene of Catsouras’ death were taken by California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers as part of standard fatal vehicle accident procedures. These photos were then forwarded to others within the Department, and then spread across the Internet. WIKI

It is not Google’s fault of course, but Google IS the internet to many people and of course it’s probably not as easy as it first sounds to clean it up but this is one SERP I’d like to see hand edited. One time I would like Google NOT to deliver so well.

That’s not all Matt Cutts might be interested in -

According to trendmicro.com, a site has been optimized to appear as the first result in Internet searches for “Nikki Catsouras.” The malware contains several variants of worms and viruses.

Maybe the spam team really does need to look at this SERP!

PS – I wouldn’t suggest you search for these images. They will undoubtedly upset you.

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