The image, which has since been removed, was also viewable at the top of the page results, exhibited as part of the Google Universal Search function, a service that combines results from the various search engines utilized by Google.
This is not the first time inappropriate images have found their way around the filters onto the Google News homepage. In October 2006 and then again last year, images were spotted by surfers that prompted outraged calls and emails to Google News, which responded to the latter incident with the comment below.
"As you may know, nude images like yesterday's are against the Google News policy. That said, since we rely on our crawler to objectively choose the headlines and images from news sites across the web, this kind of content can sneak in from time to time. That's why we're really glad to have watchful users who help us take care of these situations as quickly as possible. I'm sorry for not addressing this in the group earlier, and we openly apologize to all the users who encountered the image. We're working to make the product better and our response time faster — and in the meantime, you can continue to help out by letting us know when something like this comes up."
XBIZ sent an email to Google requesting comment about today's incident, but had not received a reply as of post time.