Google said Friday that it will remove from search results "revenge porn," or sexually explicit images of people posted without their consent. There have been stories about an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims’ accounts. Some images even end up on "sextortion" sites that force people to pay to have their images removed.

According to Amit Singhal, SVP, Google Search, "revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims-predominantly women."

So going forward, Google will honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results.

In the coming weeks Gogole will put up a web form people can use to submit these requests to the search giant.

Twitter implemented a similar policy earlier this year, banning "intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject's consent."

Google is facing a legal dispute in Europe on a similar matter, after an EU panel ordered the US tech giant to honor requests from individuals to have links to information about them deleted from searches in certain circumstances.