Steps by Google and Microsoft to make it harder to find child abuse images online have been welcomed by a Lincolnshire detective.
Det Insp Simon Lovett, who heads the Lincolnshire Police Internet Child Abuse Team, said: “Anything that reduces the chances of anybody stumbling across these disgusting sites – or looking at them through being curious – has got to be a step in the right direction.”
But he says the move will not deter the more expert, computer literate paedophiles from tracking down child abuse images – and it won’t stop them from grooming children online.
Det Insp Lovett said parents and children must remain vigilant as online paedophiles are still at work in Lincolnshire.
They pose as children, befriend their victims and then start to make demands such as asking youngsters to expose private parts of their body or perform sex acts on webcams.
He said: “Children can become trapped in this cycle and they can almost become slaves to these people because they have to do their bidding.
“As Home Secretary Theresa May said a child can be at greater risk sitting in their bedroom on their computer than they are outside the school gates.”
Google and Microsoft’s Bing have agreed measures that mean as many as 100,000 search terms will now return no results that find illegal material – and trigger warnings that child abuse pictures are illegal.
In July, Prime Minister David Cameron called on the two companies – which handle 95 per cent of computer search traffic – to ensure searches that were unambiguously aimed at finding illegal images should return no results.
He also wants them to tackle the “dark Internet” where people share illegal images online without making them generally available.
A former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, Jim Gamble, says paedophiles will still “go on the dark corners of the Internet on peer-to-peer websites”.