Few ex-offenders enjoy being reminded of the fact that they were once arrested and charged with a criminal offence, particularly when those people have since moved on to become hard working, honest members of society.

The only problem is, even after their case has been resolved, it can be quite difficult to forget that uncomfortable memory – particularly when there are dozens of websites out there that make a habit of reposting people’s mug shots in order to make a quick buck off of them. Some argue that such websites provide a good service to the public, allowing them to identify serious offenders for example, but in many cases where the offender was guilty of a less-than-serious offense, these run-ins with the law can haunt otherwise law-abiding citizens for years to come – resulting in missed job and housing opportunities, social stigma and so on.

Unfortunately, while these website might claim to be providing a “service” to the public, fact is that the only thing they’re really interested in is making money out of those unfortunate to have their face plastered all over them. Such sites often charge a fee of several hundred dollars for users to have their mugshots “unpublished”, but even if an ex-offender does so, these same images can often pop up in Google’s Image Search results, even after they’ve been removed from the website.

The New York Times recently took issue with this, querying Google on why it was rewarding such mugshot websites with favorable rankings, especially when its algorithm is supposed to favor original sources over sites that copy material (which is essentially what these sites do).

Google responded to the NYT by stating that while it sympathized with those affected by mugshot sites, “with very narrow exceptions, we take down as little as possible from search,” which didn’t sound too promising.

However, the company later wrote back, telling the NYT that the company was in fact tinkering with its search algorith to try and deal with the issue:

“Our team has been working for the past few months on an improvement to our algorithms to address this overall issue in a consistent way. We hope to have it out in the coming weeks.”

This bit of news will come as a relief to those affected by such websites. Even more promising though, is that Google isn’t the only company trying to take action against this problem. MasterCard too has promised to do its part, telling the NYT that it’ll urge merchant banks handling the accounts of those websites to end their relationships with them, while PayPal, Discover and American Express have all made similar responses.