A post titled, “Amazon pushing porn?” dings a9 about their image search tool.
>From the post, “A search for an innocuous term such as “Frontpage SEO” will call up images of nude women on the first results page, alongside Web search results for Microsoft FrontPage software and links for data on search engine optimization (SEO)…People can filter ‘mature’ pictures from A9 or close the column altogether. But even with the image-filter setting on “strict,” pornographic images may seep through.”
Of course no image-filter is perfect but the issue might be more of a Google issue than an a9 problem. a9 uses Google’s image database and their SafeSearch filter (it’s mentioned on the a9 preferences page).
Btw, when I ran the “Frontpage SEO” search at Google.com today with “strict” filtering turned on and received the same/similar results that News.com found at a9.