Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images [updated]

Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guessing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable". Update: 11/07 20:18 GMT by P : Google has a reasonable explanation.

Comments

You're guessing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were the case, why would they show up in other American search engines? Ever consider that Google is a business and has the right to choose what they want to include themselves?

Re:You're guessing?

[Izago909]

If google now relies on self censorship to promote their company image, then they can kiss their #1 ranked ass goodbye.

Re:You're guessing?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've always edited their index and they say it all over the place. The have the right to choose what they want and what they don't want showing up in their search engine. That's why people that sue them over being exluded or ranked poorly don't have a case.

And guess what... sometimes Google's index gets screwed up! One time, Google excluded THEMSELVES from their index!

Re:You're guessing?

[Ayaress]

I'd say things are a bit closer to what the article says than you think, but you're on the right track - google gives in to almost any pressure in a heartbeat. Google's always been perfectly willing to throw up the "This search has items removed which may be in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act" things in results. I've been getting them more and more often on various things. If you get creative with your search terms, you can come up with a lot of different messages about why some results were omitted from a search. I've never seen any of that on other search engines.

Re:You're guessing?

[aacool]

If you don't know already, you can track most takedown notices at http://www.chillingeffects.org/. A search for google there brings back a lot of results.

An interesting case is booble.com - sent a takedown notice by google and now reopened as tauntedbytatas.com

Re:You're guessing?

[dogfart]

And as a business they are still subject to political pressure. What the government can't block overtly, they can get their surrogates in the private sector to block with a little "persuasion". Thus the government can make it very difficult for the public to find images (or other information) that is unfavorable to the government. The net result is the same, without all the nastiness associated with direct government censorship.

Yes, I know that the average Slashdot reader can find these images elsewhere. The average just-barely-computer-literate AOL user doesn't know this, doesn't want to make the effort, or just assumes if Google doesn't have it then there is something wrong with having these images available.

Re:You're guessing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The have the right to choose what they want and what they don't want showing up in their search engine.

Yes, but if they start getting a reputation for filtering certain subjects, some people are going to start switching to other search engines. I don't think anyone said they don't have a right, only that its not a good idea.

Re:You're guessing?

[h4rm0ny]

Google is playing the game safer than most of the internet

The implication of what you've just said is that it would be risky for Google to help people find this information. And the implication of THAT is that if you criticise the Government you're going to get stomped.

The number of people who read the parent post and didn't think there was something inherantly flawed in the reasoning shows how generally accepted this viewpoint is.

And of course, they may well be right, but how far has society fallen if they are?

Re:You're guessing?

[eatmadust]

this this might explain a lot.
Especially the Floyd/Mark Kvamme and Bush relationship could explain why those images were removed.

Re:You're guessing?

[SirChive]

By the same logic the old men who rule China have a "right" to only allow their people a highly censored view of the outside world. Hey, they own the power so they can do what they want, right?

But I don't think that is how we want to view public media in this country. Businesses do not have complete freedom to censor and exclude simply because they own the media. We knew that Google manipulated their index in order to make money but it's a very different if they doing it to forward a certain political viewpoint.

For Google to censor something as important as this is truely abhorrent. If we can't trust that a Google search will be free of a political agenda then it's worthless.

Re:You're guessing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. That's not how public companies work. They owe their investors maximum profit. If they (and their investors) feel that self-censorship will improve their image and make more money, then that's what they should do.

Re:You're guessing?

[wertarbyte]

So they owe to their clients (the public) unfiltered and uncensored results.

You are not the client. You are the product. Clients are the people that place ads via google.

Re:You're guessing?

[Madcapjack]

I'll quote from Google's own website regarding romoval of pages from its search results:

"Google views the quality of its search results as an extremely important priority. Therefore, Google stops indexing the pages on your site only at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for those pages or as required by law. This policy is necessary to ensure that pages are not inappropriately removed from our index. Since Google is committed to providing thorough and unbiased search results for our users, we cannot participate in the practice of censoring information on the world wide web." source

Re:You're guessing?

[paganizer]

Then don't use it.
If enough people don't use it, they will probably change the way they do things.
I had a similar rant happen to me about one of the websites I run; I just sort of check in on things every once in a while, and if I see something that really bugs me has been posted, i'll delete it. If you don't like me editing the things I don't like from my system, don't use it.
go away.
find something you like better.
It's what made america great.

Re:You're guessing?

[caseydk]

This sounds like your emphacising the strengths of an open market-based system.

I'm glad someone besides me has taken some basic econ....

Tried it and it's true.

[h4rm0ny]

Well, I've just tried this with each of the listed search engines and it does appear to be correct for the first five pages that Google returns.

That's not good. I don't want a search engine deciding what I have access to. And know doubt this thread will turn into a troll-fest about the American invasion of Iraq and whether people are better off or not under US rule rather than Saddam, but surely neither side of the argument thinks we'll benefit from hiding the truth. That can only benefit those in the US administration.

And you can be sure that this will be picked up by the Arab world and will look bad on the US and Western Europe.

Re:Tried it and it's true.

[chrisd]

This is indeed an index aging issue. It sucks and we're sorry it sucks, but it isn't more than that.

Full post here: with a note from Sergey about this

Chris

And Yet..

[Rosyna]

... if I do a google image search for "goatse" I get all kinds of nasty results. Certainly those should be blocked as well. They are clearly a threat to national security.

I'm certainly a tinfoil hat wearer but...

[garcia]

I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

Then why do the other search engines still carry it? It seems like Google has something confused and not the government.

Re:I'm certainly a tinfoil hat wearer but...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, time for the clue stick. If we're supposed to be the free world liberating the Iraqis, we have to hold ourselves to much hugher standards than terrorists and dictators. Somehow, our torture isn't nearly as bad as their torture just doesn't cut it.

We all know that captured soldiers and civilians get brutally murdered in Iraq, and we all agree that it's bad, and that we're going to get the people responsible. This doesn't excuse things like Abu Ghraib. The entire justification for the war in Iraq rests on the fact that we have the moral high ground. You don't keep that by torturing people.

The Abu Ghraib Coloring Book

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/11504468/

A small coloring book of images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

What do you know about Abu Ghraib? What do you know about coloring books? What do you know about teaching conformity? About desensitization? About media and artist exploitation of suffering for financial gain. This swell coloring book wraps all that and more into nine pages that you can color yourself!

Freedom

[Lao-Tzu]

You know, freedom goes both ways - you have the right to see these images, but Google has the right to censor their own content.

"It's good to know that I should use Google's competitors to search for this type of thing, in case Google is holding back relevant results." - That statement makes this seem like a bad business decision.

Re:Freedom

[DeltaBlaster]

You know, freedom goes both ways - you have the right to see these images, but Google has the right to censor their own content.

Sure they have the right to, but is it a good idea? Of course not. We have the right.ability to just use another search engine if they are seceretly restricting information. Either way, it's still a pretty crappy thing to do.

Re:Freedom

[vrimj]

Of course Google can censor what they like, but it is approprate to find such instances and call them on it. Censorship calls in to question Googles reliablity as an information provider and thus need to be reported on and highlighted.

I do not think anyone is saying they can't do this, they are only pointing out that as customers of Googles service they find it disturbing

Is this the work of Bush?

[qbzzt]

I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

Last time I checked, Google was a private company. It's very easy to fling accusations of censorship in a free society, but don't you think you need something more than "a private company wouldn't provide me the information"?

Bye

Re:Is this the work of Bush?

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Google is publically traded and in a position of trust. They're free to edit their results, but such editing should be done in an environment of full disclosure. Instead, they're acting as 1984's Ministry of Truth, making information disappear for a large segment of the population that isn't savvy enough to look for it elsewhere.

Re:Is this the work of Bush?

[matt_martin]

This is the new Amerika -

Private companies chisel away at all of the freedoms and protections that have been won throughout history. Sheep that we are, we sign them all away with the stroke a pen without even reading the "agreement". (Employment, service agreements, product purchases, money lending, etc)
In some cases all you need to do is "open the packaging" to implicitly agree with their version of the law.

With the media, you don't even sign anything. They just show us whatever they want us to see.

These practices were much more effective now than ever because there is a decreasing degree of competition out there (larger & more powerful companies with increasing power). You have fewer alternatives every day.

And since the trend is international, its hard to say that this is really an "American" pheomenon.
Maybe we're just noticing it first.

Re:Is this the work of Bush?

[fireboy1919]

Yeah, so is CNN. But if, for example, CNN failed to cover the 9/11 story as it happened claiming it would affect confidence in our nation, I'd be a bit upset.

Google, like CNN, is a news source. It's integrity is based upon its ability to report what it has found without bias. Granted, CNN hasn't got a lot of integrity left in this area, but I'd expect that if something REALLY major happens, they'd report it to me.

In my mind, previously, google had a lot of integrity: I think they've been doing accurate search stuff without bias for a long time. They seem a bit less moral now. Let's hope they don't end up selling all their morals.

Re:Is this the work of Bush?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Exactly. Ultimately all functions of the government will be replaced by private enterprise. When this happens we'll lose all of our freedoms. Constitution? What constitution? It only serves to limit the powers of government. But there are no such checks on the power of corporations. And everyone will live in denial. Censorship? How can there be censorship, there's no government to do it. It'll be called self-censorship instead and will be accepted by everyone.

Re:Is this the work of Bush?

[belmolis]

The so-called Patriot Act is bad, but it isn't a secret. Here's a link to the complete text. Here's another. The ACLU didn't sue to see the complete Act. We (I'm not directly involved, but I'm proud to be a card-carrying member) sued to oppose certain actions under the act. The Act makes it illegal to disclose that some actions have been taken, e.g. that a search has taken place. That's why even mentioning the actions at issue was arguably illegal and a risk for the ACLU. Here's the ACLU press release.

The ACLU also took action, initially in the form of a Freedom of Information Act request, to find out how the government has been using the Act. Here's a link to the ACLU's press releases on the initial FOIA request and subsequent activity. The ACLU has all sorts of information about the "Patriot Act" here.

Ads

[mckniglj]

I love slashdot. Under 'related links', there's a link for 'Best deals: Censorship' through PriceGrabber.

Sorry, it made me laugh.

This is what happens when companies go public.

[palutke]

I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

No, somebody in Google's 'risk management' department probably decided that it would be a prudent step to avoid bad publicity or offending shareholders. The minute Google went public, their primary responsibility became looking after the best interests of their shareholders, not being an impartial index of internet sites.

Re:Another spin..

[vjzuylen]

There were plenty of pictures where the prisoners were not identifyable. Also, your theory doesn't account for the absence of Lynndie's pictures.

Images Index Old

[christowang]

I've found the Google Image Index to be quite old. For instance if you type in 'world series', you get images of 2002 and before. The Red Sox are stilled cursed.

I think it's possible that no images have been indexed of the prisoners over the sensoring theory.

Type in 'abu ghraib images' in the Web search and the first page that comes up is detailed images of the abuse.

Re:Images Index Old

[the_quark]

I think this hits it on the head - Images isn't updated very often. Check out, for example, pictures of the toddler who was rescued from a well a week ago. A regular Google search for Jermere McMillan photo returns 117 results, the first of which has a picture. An image search for Jermere McMillan returns no result. Although it's hard to imagine what the Bush administration's angle is on supressing that picture.

Even more clearly that this is not a sinister Bush /Rove plot: Ashley Faulkner is a girl whose mother died on September 11, 2001. There is a recently famous picture of George Bush giving Ashley a hug that a Bush-friendly 527 made into a political ad. This picture has been known about for some time; the picture was taken at the beginning of May and was reported on at the time. It's certainly had time to propagate through the net: A google search for Ashley Faulkner Bush photo returns 4290 results, the first few of which all include the picture. A Google image search for Ashley Faulkner Bush returns no images. Explain to me again how propagating this image would be "Politcally Undesirable" for the Bush administration.

Rob just speculating this is government malfeasance is ridiculous. There is no evidence to support his positiona and no evidence to even suggest it. Slashdot should post a conspicious retraction to this groundless acusation. The story here isn't "Bush represses Google," it's "Google's image index isn't updated very often." Stick to reporting the news, please, not your tired conspiracy theories!

A consumer may choose.

[rastakid]

Ever consider that Google is a business and has the right to choose what they want to include themselves?

Jup, that's right. But keep in mind that the consumer has also a right: the right to choose. So, if Google does censor its spider index, the consumer has the right to know that and based on that information may choose to continue using Google, or may start using another search engine.
Remember that Google has only admitted censoring its index in the past after someone said 'Hey, I can't find page "blabla" using Google'. It would be better if they announced censoring on the forehand.

-1, Idiotic.

[Wakko Warner]

Hello? Google is an information provider. What they're doing, if they're doing it, is knowingly and willfully blocking access to information, simply because that information happens to be controversial.

Would you like it if your doctor only told you what was right with your body?

Idiot.

- A.P.

Never trust a single source

[Teun]

However good Google might be, this is just a proof of why not to trust a single source.

Because we've started to see Google as The Best, this is The Best proof of why not to trust a single source.

We all know that Google has a sort of Moral Conduct Policy (like no gun advertising) but maybe they should make it optional like with is the SafeSearch option to limit the exposure to, of all thing, people in their natural state.

At least their wish for Moral Conduct should make them set up an easily accessible list of things they have 'banned', be it on request or following their own standards.

Google just sucks

[blamanj]

Sorry, conspiricy theorists. There's a simpler answer, and that's that Google isn't the right tool for the job. Use Yahoo or Picsearch.

To verify this, try the following search "Obama convention". You'll get hits on Yahoo and Picsearch, but not Google. Goolge image search simply isn't timely. Their image index cycle appears to be about six months, and the Abu Ghraib pictures in (I think) around June.

If Google were truly censoring, they'd censor the text search too, and you can easily find the pictures using the text search.

Re:Google just sucks

[Neophytus]

Perhaps then they should step up their renewal cycle, at least when indexing new pages into their database. With 20/20 hindsight it's an obvious problem.

Re:Google just sucks

[Mornelithe]

Shhh.

Google is getting very big, and they just became a publicly traded company. That means it's becoming fashionable (on Slashdot) to lambast Google based on whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. Obivously they're censoring, and we should all complain about how news sources have a responsibility to report unbiased versions of the news and both sides of the story. Never mind that Google doesn't really produce news reports, and that there's no such thing as an unbiased news source that reports all sides of the story, and that there's probably a reasonable explanation besides censorship in this case.

Please, let's not let logic enter into this. Groupthink and alarmism is much easier, and more accepted around here.

Re:Google just sucks

[hikerhat]

Hmm. But if you search for barack obama you do get hits. Including his pic at the Illinois state senate web site, which must have only been updated a few days ago.

Re:Google just sucks

[blamanj]

Yes, but that has an explanation, too. News images rotate in on a temporary basis from the "News" secton. You can find images from "Bush wins election 2004" as well (though not "Kerry concedes", but they may well disappear by December.

Re:Google just sucks

[Mornelithe]

The post I replied to gave the reasonable explanation of the situation. But, in case you can't be bothered to go and read it, I'll post it here in reply to yours.

Google's image index is, in general, far out of date. The only current images are pulled in from the news index. When news isn't current anymore, it falls out of the news index, and consequently falls out of the image index.

That explains this whole situation. It's reasonable, and far more likely than the "Google is censoring random stuff" theory.

However, when a story like this gets posted, you'll see one or two replies with the reasonable explanation, and the rest will be, "Google is censoring!" and "public corporations are evil, so Google is turning evil!" They have no evidence either, and the events can be more reasonably explained by non-conspiracy theories, but that's not what gets moderated up easily, and not what most people here want to believe.

Lots of people gather here to bash Microsoft and other large corporations, and talk about how they all want to oppress us, and to some extent, I agree -- corporations have too much control over governmental policy and such. However, since Google has become publicly traded, there have been lots of people around here promoting the idea that Google is suddenly becoming evil, and lots of people readily agreeing with them with no other evidence than, "corporations bad!"

I'm not a Google fanboy, or the fanboy of any other big, oppressive corporation. I probably shouldn't even care what people here think, because it's too small a population to make any real difference one way or another for most things. But the behavior here is very similar to branding people "unpatriotic cowards" as you suggest, and that behavior annoys me.

Probable answer

[Rayonic]

Most likely, Google was trying to make the Abu Gharib images recognized by their "SafeSearch" feature. Which is to say, if you have SafeSearch turned on, those somewhat explicit images wouldn't display (as I'm sure they did before, as none of the normal keywords would have applied).

But somebody screwed up, and now they're blocked even if you have SafeSearch turned off. I'd expect this to be fixed soon.

Anti-Americanism?

[Sean Clifford]

How is criticizing the Administration being anti-American?

It is about time!

[mat catastrophe]

I tried to submit this as an AskSlashdot feature on where to turn when Google's policies censor searches you want weeks ago. Thanks for finally running something on this.

I think it is high time that people woke up to what google is doing out there. We can talk a big game about google "being a privately held company" and "freedom to do what they want" and whatnot, but it is seriously frightening to me exactly what it is that they want to do to the internet, especially when they are not too terribly forthcoming about what they want.

Do any of you all use an alternate search engine? If so, post it and let us all get away from google. We claim that decentralized data is what we love the internet for, yet we all clamor to a single search engine for that data. It's incongruous and seemingly dissonant to do this.

Complete FUD, really.

[krunk7]

Second hit on google web search for abu ghraib:

Abu Ghraib Photo's

Now, it is odd that their image gallery isn't equally pertinant, but I think it's more of a reflection on google having a poor image search engine or prehaps poorly maintained index....not some grand censorship conspiracy theory.

Arab world

[gaijin99]

And if there's one thing we here in the U.S. really, really hate, it's to look bad in the Arab world

And people wonder why there is widespread doubt that the US entered Iraq with the intent of "liberating" the Iraqi people...

War is not about killing your enemies, every strategist from Sun Tsu to Carl von Clausewitz to the modern Pentagon made, and makes, that point. War is about convincing your enemies to surrender. Cowing them through sheer military might is not enough, that's what people mean when they talk about "winning the peace". Ask yourself why the guerillas in Iraq have so much support, then look at the US shutting down a newspaper, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, etc. I think its pretty damn important that we not look bad to the Arab world.

Re:Arab world

[Jerf]

The "use missile strikes in densly populated areas" approach has not worked yet, neither in Iraq nor Israel, and I see no reason why it should suddenly start working.

Pray tell, what can we do in Iraq or anywhere else where the government didn't want us there? Whatever you may propose in answer to this question, the first step will always be "remove that government", or you have a faulty understanding of the governments of the Middle East.

I tend to agree that killing people isn't necessarily the path to peace. But we are building schools and hospitals and relationships. Your apparent belief that the US is just over there, gunning people down, shows both your own lack of initiative in getting enough information to form your opinions and the failure of the news media to present an accurate picture of what is going on over there. If it bleeds, it leads, but bleeding isn't anywhere near the whole story.

The first step in "winning the peace" is re-writing the board so that we can win the piece. Hopefully we're near the end of that phase, but that does involve killing people who are violently insisting that they, and everybody else, will continue to live in the 12th century. I'd love to live in a world where all we had to do was ride over in our "Reading is Fundamental" Van and hand out books peacefully, but we don't live in that world.

Based on your post, you ought to be supporting our actions on the whole, even as you may criticize aspects of our actions. We don't need a new plan, we need more people to understand what the current one really is.

Re:Arab world

[NoOneInParticular]

Oh no, you don't seem to understand. The first thing to do is to tell our friendly governments in the Arab world (this only excludes Syria and Lybia and possibly Tunisia at this point) that this whole idea of transforming actual education to a fundamentalist religious training was a tremendously bad idea of us.
We know, we've told them for thirty years that this was the only way to counter the socialist menace that was threatening peace, but we can change our minds, can't we?

Currently, the level of education in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, etc. is appalling. Students are required to spend more than half of their time studying the Koran, this includes technical education. This indeed to quell any thought of a fairer form of government (read: socialism). Unfortunately, this backfired, and now the Arab world is stuck with a generation of people that have no education whatsoever and are striving for the reformation of government based upon the principles of the Koran. Well, they did follow our suggestions.

Trouble is, even if we do start to educate, with a well educated population, they might want to try socialism again, because face it, USA style capitalism is not something most people want. At least, I do not know of any stable democracy that implements it even close to the American way.

Re:Arab world

[gaijin99]

Howabout we start by having a civilized conversation without unwarranted assumptions, 'k? Nothing I wrote stated, or implied, that the only thing the US government was doing in Iraq was killing people. I *did* point out that using missiles to take out combatants in residential areas is a bad idea, which isn't the same thing at all.

I disagree with your basic assumption that the US needed to invade Iraq. Pakistan, just as an example, had and continues to have, weapons much more powerful than Saddam ever had a wet dream about, and the proven willingness to sell the secrets of making those weapons to terrorists. Not only that, but there is very strong evidence linking the dictator of Pakistan to terrorists operating in the Kashmir region. I'm not saying that we should have invaded Pakistan, but I am saying that Iraq seems to have been less of a threat than Pakistan is, and Pakistan is simply the easiest example I can think of.

Given that 15 out of 19 of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi subjects, I would have expected the US to use its political muscle to force the Saudi dictators to stop funding "schools" that do nothing more than teach children to hate America. I find it horrifying that this basic step has not yet happened, and that the US government continues to be quite friendly to the Saudi despots.

Similarly, while military action in Afghanistan was self-evidently necessary, the US never put more than 1/10th of the troops on the ground there that are currently in Iraq. After the bombs stopped falling, the Bush government seemed to loose interest. In evidence of that, I will point out that in 2003, the year after the invasion of Afghanistan the Bush government's proposed budget had $0 for rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan. As a consiquence, the heroin output of Afghanistan is now back to pre-war levels, warlords control huge segments of the country, and the Taliban is growing again. I don't think you can successfully combat terrorism by taking that approach to things.

As for Iraq, the rebuilding is going quite slowly, in large part because the US government does little to involve the Iraqis in the rebuilding. Unemployment is 80% in Iraq today. Virtually all rebuilding is done by foreign contractors, which doesn't contribute much to Iraq's economy, nor to fostering a sense of confidence in the nationbuilding process.

Given both what the Bush government said before the war began, and news reports indicating that planning for the post-war was essentially ignored, I cannot agree with you that "we need more people to understand what the current one [plan] really is". I'd settle for there being a plan, much less having a good one, and I do not see any evidence that there was a well laid out plan.

"The United States is committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid," 20030328 O.M.B. Director Mitch Daniels. I quote former Director Daniels as an example of the unwarranted optimism that went into what little planning was done. Richard Perle said that he'd be surprised if there wasn't a grand square in Bagdhad named after president Bush. In March 2003, during a meeting of war planners and intelligence officials at Shaw Air Force Base, an Army official's presentation on the Pentagon's strategy included a slide on "Phase 4-C," the period of rebuilding after fighting had ended. That slide said only "To Be Provided." Knight Ridder Newspapers. "the insurgency was not inevitable ... We had momentum going in and had Saddam's forces on the run. But we did not have enough troops ... They took advantage of our limited numbers." Major General James A. Marks.

My points here aren't that complex: 1) there doesn't seem to have been any reality based post war planning, and 2) that lack is creating sympathy for terrorists both in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. Abu Gharib was just the icing on the cake.

It depends

[HarveyBirdman]

Honest criticism is American and wholesome and apple pie and all that.

But too many people these days are just making shit up out of the vacuum, and stuff that is so obviously stupid you can't help but start to question their motives and, in some cases, their sanity. This applies equally to the woo-woos who think Bush planned 9/11 and the hoo-hahs who think Clinton had dozens of people whacked in Arkansas.

Personally, I think they are just trapped in ideological singularities that they have constructed in their minds as an alternative to dealing wth the true complexity of the world, but, hey, that's just me.

Ideology and politics. It's easier than thinking.

Re:It depends

[WindBourne]

You need some long history lessons. American policians and their policies have historically been attacked by the opposing parties as well as the press. In fact, that is the function of the press. Up until JFK, the press went after the politician and his policy only. Starting with JFK, they seems to feel that their personal life was fair game (too be honest, I think that is the opposite party pushing that crap). The same can be said of Carter (distance family was fair game), Poppa Bush (Neil in particular, gwb as well when poppa was in the white house), and Clinton( Interesting that they did not pursue LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, or GWB's family to any length ).

Now with GWB, he AND HIS POLICIES seem to be off-limits. In addition, their is now patriot act (I and II) that is thrown up at the press, companies, and individuals to prevent them from doing what they should do; that is report and criticize the policies.

Yeah, the Administration

[ichthus]

Sure, Taco. It MUST be that evil Bush administration. Google has no autonomy, but the other search engines do. Think about it.

Once again, your unfounded political bias shines through as total ignorance.

Understanding Google

[Cokelee]

Why Politics Don't Belong on Slashdot, And other useful info . . . :-P

First off, Google is _very_ different from other search engines. They want to separate out blog content from other websites. They also put national news articles (that usually decay in a month or so) in news.google.com, and they allow users to rate websites and add their input in a magical way to PageRank. Given all of this I do not believe this could be called political as implied by the editor or censorship (since it is impossible for a private company to actually be involved in censorship). Such statements imply that Google News would also not have stories on the events that occurred in the prison, since they don't want you to know about it. I think you might be seeing the results of people looking at the sites (that have the GoogleToolbar) and rating them poorly. Moreoever, the results shown on yahoo are from news services--these things may be searched from news.google.com. Somehow a plethora of results come up there.

This brings me to my subtitle: Politics don't belong on Slashdot. No one is going to get rid of the section, and even if they did, it doesn't matter now. The entire site is now an acceptable place to insert your political opinions without actually analyzing a situation. This doesn't lead to more coherent discussion, or in this case even restraint on the part of the editor to develop a conspiracy theory in one line (without having to even develop it because so many people are already have the same mindset that they're ready to jump on anything they can). From now on, politics will be acceptable discussion on Slashdot in any topic, and for that reason I think the site's technical discussion over time may be greatly diluted.

This is neither a death wish, nor a threat to stop reading Slashdot. Slashdot may stay a good news site, but it's community is being threatened.

-Adam Colclough

MOD UP! 100% Explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

That would explain EXACTLY the reason the prison images were available when the scandal was covered heavily in the news. Images was simply returning results from the News section which had them in the index. Now they've expired from the news index and won't reappear in the image index until their infrequent update.

Re:Get real...

[DeepHurtn!]

Everytime I hear an American say something like "Send 'im to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison" I shudder. If extra-judicial and indiscriminate RAPE has become a socially tolerated and even *expected* method of punishment, something is really, really fucked up.

Worse than that. This isn't criticism. It's fact.

[khasim]

And the implication of THAT is that if you criticise the Government you're going to get stomped.

This isn't criticism of the government. This is about actual pictures taken of actual events.

Google is now self-censoring factual information.

Not someone's opinion or belief or criticism. Factual information.

I could, possibly, understand self-censoring opinion and criticism if based upon your beliefs. Why rely upon google to index people's insane rants and conspiracy theories?

But when it comes to self-censoring links to actual pictures of actual events, particularly ones that are of such political significance, that's way over the line.

Official Respons from Google.

[chrisd]

Hi All,

Sergey asked me to pass this on:

• In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.

  In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib photos] [abu graib photos] to get plenty of what you are looking for.

From me:

Please don't ascribe some dating issues on images to some political motive, we take this kind of stuff very seriously. We have to comply with the law, but there is no law yet on the books reguiring that companies in the United States take down pictures that might be embarassing ot the current administration.

Chris DiBona

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[Hechz]

That seems a VERY unlikely explanation as they WERE available. That and the story is QUITE OLD.

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, right, sure.

Up to date is one thing. Having ALL the more famous photos in question NOT show up in a search is another.

Try again.

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your image index is not updated as frequently as it should be, eh? Then why do searches for events such as "halloween 2004" -- which happened much more recently than the prison abuse -- show up just fine?
halloween 2004
We take this kind of stuff very seriously too, you know.

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[chrisd]

As others noted, this is a view into the different ways that google schedules the crawl. Some sites get crawled more often than others, and some images are updated faster than others. And some stay in the index longer. News ones (I think) transit through the index perhaps faster than they should. I'm really going outside my level of expertise here though, So I won't go on about this too much, but I assure you that it isn't some bush administration/google partisan trickey.

Chris DiBona

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[Christopher Thomas]

I dont think its a "technical issue aka sorry we cant do it", but a willingful decision of delay to not let "critical material" of any kind spread as fast over the number one info-pool as it otherwise really could

Stop and think about this for a minute.

Do you have any idea how _huge_ an amount of effort it would take to screen images indexed and search terms and tweak them so that no images "harmful to the administration" came up?

When it takes this much effort, and there's nobody holding a gun to their head, and they have competitors gaining mindshare, why the _hell_ would Google bother with this? Their primary purpose is to make money, not please Republicans, and they're going to be around a lot longer than Bush will be in power!

The line is that their "news" images cycle out of the index quickly, and I can certainly believe this - after all, if I'm searching for newsfeed images, chances are I'm asking about something that happened recently.

Trying to stage a cover-up of the type suggested would be very expensive and not a good business strategy.

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[Dachannien]

For all the people who for whatever reason still don't believe you, you might also point out that this search still results in over 100 hits.

Re:Official Respons from Google.

[Atzanteol]

Simple. Not finding information on a subject does not mean none exists.

Christ people, just because Google is Good(TM) doesn't mean you should forget how to lookup information using other sources!

Hey, they're not perfect! Go figure!

Real reason

[Chuck Chunder]

Once Google realised that 99% of searches on Google image search were for "Alyssa Milano nude" they just stopped bothering to maintain it...

To those who still don't believe it

[ESqVIP]

Well, I'm buying it.

My main reason is that when I do a Google Images search, the number of 404s I get when trying to see the actual pictures is fairly high; depending on the search, I think I already got over 50% broken links.

So, the indication that Google Images' index is outdated does make sense to me. Just like the guy that reported his Morgan Webb picture is still indexed "7 months after it was removed".

Now moving on, I'll happily wait for this update, so the image search gets useful again and returns more than a bunch of outdated links.