I don't know, but a lot of you seem to disagree with him.

However, this is actually a decent idea in my opinion. He makes an "okay" case in the post except that he ends it with some reasoning that Google should care about their image (pun not intended). He should have ended it by pointing out that it would then finally be "safe" to link to Google Images without having to worry (too much) about the results that might appear for the user (you don't know if they have safe search on or off).

Hell, I can think if valid reasons for why I could have wanted to link to a Google Image resultset and not doing it because of what might pop up for the user.

This might also have the added benefit of porn-sites playing the search rankings less. At least for innocent words.