Google says it will remove sexually explicit images of people posted without their consent from their search results.

The internet giant says it wants to rid the online world of “revenge porn”.

It will soon put up an online form that allows victims to request items be removed from Google search queries.

“We've heard many troubling stories of revenge porn: an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims' accounts,” Google search vice president Amit Singhal said in a blog post.

“Some images even end up on ‘sextortion’ sites that force people to pay to have their images removed.

“Our philosophy has always been that search should reflect the whole web.

“But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims - predominantly women.”

Mr Singhal says Google will “honour requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google search results”.

He admits it is “a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures” that come up in search results.

“We know this won't solve the problem of revenge porn - we aren't able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves - but we hope that honouring people's requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help."’

Twitter brought in a similar policy earlier this year that banned “intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject's consent”.

Link aggregator and online forum Reddit has also taken steps to curb the posting of explicit images without consent of the people in them.

Reddit’s move is related to the strong criticism it copped for allowing the distribution of hacked nude pictures of Hollywood stars, known there as ‘The Fappening’.