Last week an offensive image of First Lady Michelle Obama was removed from Google's search index. It did so, saying that the site hosting the image violated Google’s guidelines by serving malware to visitors. However, the same image remained available on other sites that hadn’t run served up malware and been de-indexed. Thus, searches for Michelle Obama in Google Image Search will show the offensive image.
If you search for Michelle Obama, you'll get the sponsored ad as shown above that displays "Offensive Search Results" as its title. The ad says "Sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree. Read more."
The link to the ad leads users to http://www.google.com/resultsinfo.html, which explains why results can sometimes offend. The key to the explanation is that indexing is automated and not based on Google's opinion. They state "Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google." In other words, we had nothing to do with the Michelle Obama image, or any other such disturbing content.
That is also a key takeaway: any other disturbing content. They have done this before for other search queries as well. For example, they have used the same "Offensive Search Results" ad used for the Micelle Obama event to explain similar offensive results for searches that have brought up other offensive content, such as, in the past the word, "jew." Currently this isn't bringing up an explanatory ad, but it has in the past.
Other examples include 2006, when Google also bought ads to explain why George Bush’s page on whitehouse.gov ranked first for "miserable failure." The ads were slightly different, but had the same intent. In fact, the Bush incident is popularly known as the first "Google bomb," fooling Google's search algorithm to rank selected Web sites higher.
Written by Michael Santo
HULIQ.com
Posted November 24th, 2009 by Michael Santo
