Google Image Index Just Not Updated

We ran a story earlier today about the lack of Abu Ghraib photos in Google's image index. We now have a response from Google stating that the image index simply hasn't been updated recently, as well as a fairly convincing demonstration from a Slashdot reader: Rahga writes "I put together a page that counters the 'Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images' story. It is the tale of a Morgan Webb picture on images.google.com that's been driving a ton of traffic to my webserver 7 months after it was removed." The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004 (and officially became a non-story on November 2, 2004), so Google's index is indeed quite far behind.

Comments

I can vouch for this

[metlin]

Like I mentioned in this post, I can vouch for this.

For the longest time, the search for my name on Google images would bring up really old images and it would never update them. So, in order to test this, I just removed those images and used a redirect (this was about 3-4 months ago) -- Google still did not update the pictures.

However, my academic page at my school did show up pretty soon, although it was created just recently. What more, it even showed the image of my latest schedule, and not an earlier one as in the other case.

So I guess Google probably uses some kinda weird algorithm to determine which sites are likely to be dynamic, and which are not -- and update/not update them accordingly.

Besides, everytime there's been a problem/censorship (say, due to DMCA) -- Google has been nice enough to notify the users during the search. Not to mention the amount of scalability doing something like this would require of them (which makes even less sense if they were the ONLY ones asked to do so).

So all in all, just a false alarm, I suppose.

Re:I can vouch for this

[ratsnapple tea]

The image search also looks through pictures in the recent news, but no older than about a month or so. Earlier this year the photos were all over the media; now that the furor's died down, it's out of range again.

It's been a problem for a while now

[hate_this_nick]

I have been trying to update the picture that google images has of me, but for at elast 8 month google will index the html page and ignore the image. This is a new image, with new name etc.

dogpile.com?

[earthforce_1]

It is a fairly minimialist search engine that searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, LookSmart, Overture and FindWhat. I tried it a few times and find it occasionally returns a few more useful results than Google, and doesn't have an annoying clutter of ads.

(I supposed if it did I wouldn't know, I have mozilla configured to block even flash ads, and my firewall is configured to route most known ad servers to 127.0.0.1)

non-story?

[mark_lybarger]

(and officially became a non-story on November 2, 2004)

maybe the mass media isn't covering the prision over there in the sandy beach, but it's not all quiet, and definately deserves attention of those not deployed over there.

americans are still dying every day in that prision (which is controled by the americans). american troops are deployed in and around that prision sometimes for months at a time with no productive mission other than to be deployed so a general or such can get another stripe on their shirt. this is what our tax dollars are being used for.

there's units that have their own cooks but can't use them due to contracts with another food supply "company". what are these cooks doing? not a damn thing. there's people who are budgeted for a years deployment, but have replacements aready there. what happens to these troops? they get re-deployed to another closer area. these aren't the full time troops either, these are the reservists who are being forced to sit on their arse in the desert.

by the way, there's policy in abu-grabib now that photos MUST have faces digitally distorted. meaning if a solder takes a photo of someone who's leg has been blown off, make sure there's no face in the picture. i'm not even sure if they're aloud to send photos out w/o permission these days.

sign up folks, it's in the name of democracy after all.

Re:non-story?

[Ahaldra]

I was taught that it was God-Father's (Yahweh's) wish that God-Son (Jesus) were sent to Earth to die by torture.

Huh? I read that book, but cannot remember this part. Maybe you (or your teachers) are just interpreting "To live and die as a human among humans" as "To die a gruesome death, just because"?

Re:non-story?

[JourneymanMereel]

Quick question for you, mark_laybarger.... where are you getting your information? I ask this because I'm sitting inside the prison facility that is Abu Ghraib (notice the correct spelling) and only some of what you say is even close to the truth.

americans are still dying every day in that prision (which is controled by the americans). american troops are deployed in and around that prision sometimes for months at a time with no productive mission other than to be deployed so a general or such can get another stripe on their shirt. this is what our tax dollars are being used for.

First, the nit-picky part. I believe you meant to say "so a general or such can get another star on their shirt" as Generals in the Army (or any US branch, for that matter) don't wear stripes but instead wear stars. You see, stripes are worn by the enilisted soldiers that actually do the real work yet don't get anywhere near officer's pay.

Now for the meat of that paragraph. American's die every day in this prison? Wow... I wasn't aware of that. In fact, I'm only aware of 2 fatailies since I've got here in March (one Marine in April and one civilian recently). We have had some injuries... one even really serious, but that's it as far as American causulaties at his prison.

there's units that have their own cooks but can't use them due to contracts with another food supply "company". what are these cooks doing? not a damn thing. there's people who are budgeted for a years deployment, but have replacements aready there. what happens to these troops? they get re-deployed to another closer area. these aren't the full time troops either, these are the reservists who are being forced to sit on their arse in the desert.

Amazingly enough, the first part of this paragraph I actually agree with. I think it's absurd that the government pays KBR 10 times (possibly exagerated, probably not) what they'd pay a soldier who's already trained to do a job. Our company alone brought numerous cooks, but we still have civilians doing all the cooking. That's not to say that cooks are doing nothing. Some are in "supervisor" postions inside these civilian run DEFACs and others have been given other tasks to do that don't relate to cooking but still need to be done.

And about being re-deployed to another closer area because your replacements are there but you're still budgeted for deployment. BS. I will not give specific numbers as those are, quite frankly, none of your buisness, but I can tell you that the majority of soldiers who got here in February '04 are still here. Some have been sent south to a prison faclity near the Kuwait border and some have gone home (either individuals for individual reasons or a few that had neared their "2 years in 5" deployment mark. Oh, and the nit-picky point here: "re-deployment" is the Army term for going back to the states. I know, it doesn't make much sense, but that's the way it is.

by the way, there's policy in abu-grabib now that photos MUST have faces digitally distorted. meaning if a solder takes a photo of someone who's leg has been blown off, make sure there's no face in the picture. i'm not even sure if they're aloud to send photos out w/o permission these days.

Believe it or not, this is not some policy they pulled out of thing air. To the best of my knowledge, the Geneva Convention prohibts taking pictures of Prisoners of War or Civilian Detainees with their faces visible as a personal momento. That seems logical to you, doesn't it? And for what it's worth, I can send pictures home without asking first.

But what do I know... it's not like I'm in a potion to know a single thing about Abu Ghraib prison.

Re:Google's got some bugs to work out

[blether]

That's not a bug. Suppose lots of sites link to page X, and many of the links contain the text "to be or not to be". Then Google will think page X has something to do with "to be or not to be", even if page X doesn't contain that text.

Re:Google's got some bugs to work out

[Anonymous Coward]

If you view the cached page, you'll see a message in the header: "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: to be or not to be". That's how you can tell.

Re: Google sensorship defending Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, not really. But following a long running and very successful troll on slashdot ($699 sco license fee), my co-workers and I started calling open source people teabaggers.

Well, the other day, I was doing some work on Linux and I decided to change my MSN name accordingly, however, I couldn't find any decent pictures on google concerning teabagging... (snif)

Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

[monoi]

I don't understand why we can't have non-partisan media.

This would be what you're looking for, I think.

Re:Can you say dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in journalism there's a tradition of printing retractions for mistakes made on page A1 on a future page A1 in order to give the takeback as much exposure as the mistake

You must not live in the US. Here if there's a retraction or correction printed at all it's buried on page B28, not on page A1.

Re:where does it say this?

[nigelo]

RTFL: Look at the *second* link returned by that search at Google. litigousbastards.com has a campaign to post links to SCO using that phrase. The phrase is in the referring links, not the target site.

The campaign appears to be working!

Re:Huh what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada - During the 1995 peacekeeping effort in Somalia a young looter was tortured and killed. The perps were jailed (one tried to kill himself but survived the attempt although in a vegatative state) and the Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded. And it wasn't even an election year.

Re:Can you say dupe?

[totatis]

in journalism there's a tradition of

In journalism, there's also a tradition of doing your job. The editors could have, at the very least, wrote a fucking email to google to know their position. What kind of real journalist wouldn't at least try to get the other side vision of fact ?
Even paparazzi would do that to avoid lawsuits.

And, on top of that, as others have mentionned the editors can't even apologize.

Their accusations were very serious, they didn't even try to check anything, and they offer no apologies ? Why are such morons even paid ?

Competition from Yahoo

[managerialslime]

Funny how the same crowd that supports multiple operating system variants and multiple browsers treats google images like they were the one and only.

When I search with Google images for the phrase, "Abu Ghraib" , I get exactly 127 images.

When I search for the same phrase using Yahoo's image search:

http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl= en

I get 3,493 images.

The moral here? Stop thinking about Google as the be-all and end all.

There IS competition out there, SO USE IT!

Only if you use the competition will google have the motivation to update their database and be competitive in this area!

That google is providing an inferior product is only an indication that we are being lazy consumers.

Personally, I like Google's GUI layout better than Googles. This is why I'm rooting for Google to come up to speed.

While we're identifying Google problems in the image area, Google might also think about suppressing images that are 98% the same color. Some searches are overwhelmed with that kind of drek.

And speaking of overwhelming drek, how about EITHER doing pre-display background checks for broken links and suppressing them, OR just developing a "cached" option like we get for web text pages. Either approach would save time and aggravation for the user.

And if the company that prides itself on not being evil would care to throw us a bone, give the advance image screen the same ability given to the other other screens to display results at 10, 20, 50, or 100 per screen!

Update the base, suppress the monocolor trash, cash images or suppress the links fom the search results, make the advance search give count options. By god, they could be MUCH MUCH MUCH less sucky.

Meds kicking in.....

must sleep now....

Hillary tucking me in while in the Lincoln Bedroom in January, 2009. ......sleep......

Re:Just because Slashdot says it doesn't make it t

[Dun Malg]

the original google-censoring story had a mention that the IMAGES WERE THERE, but did no longer appear on the image search like they had few weeks earlier(thus the (re)indexing excuse being damage control or 'google is da god' groupthink).

I've noticed that the google images search seems to catalog two distinct kinds of pics: the high-turnover images from high traffic sites (mostly news sites), and the deep spidering of essentially random images from all the other sites. Since news-type sites have a lot of "churn", google re-spiders them frequently and the images search database gets updated for those sites fairly regularly. All other sites are pretty much just "when the spider gets around to it". It's not surprising that the Abu Ghraib pics would "fall off" the images index when the news sites moved on to the next titilating scandal of the week, and the slow-ass "rest of the 'net" image spider has a half-year-plus lag time in updating old entries. So you can't find Abu Ghraib pics. You also can't find "Alexandra Kerry in her black dress at Cannes" pics. But you can find plenty of pics of Paula Radcliffe, the marathon runner, running with the Union Jack and wearing number 576, even though those pics are under a day old. Good luck finding those same pics of her in a week though!