Google today pledged to crack down on "revenge porn," or sexually explicit content posted without the permission of those involved.

While the company said it believes "that Search should reflect the whole Web," it understands that "revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women."

As a result, it will now "honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results," Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, wrote in a blog post. "This 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 may surface in our search results."

Google will offer a Web form in the next few weeks where people can submit requests for removal.

"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 honoring people's requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help," Singhal said.

In March, Twitter updated its terms to specify that the site frowns heavily on posting nude or sexual photos of third parties without their consent. That came several months after nonprofit advocacy group Women Action and the Media teamed up with Twitter to launch a reporting tool that allows victims of gendered harassment—including revenge porn—to submit a detailed complaint.

In January, the Federal Trade Commission banned the operator of revenge porn websites, Craig Brittain, from posting risqué images of people without their consent, and ordered him to destroy the content he collected while operating those sites. Ironically, he later filed a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) request to have 23 links related to an FTC decision against him removed from Google.

Across the pond, revenge porn is now illegal in the U.K. and punishable by two years in prison.