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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.
Anyone have any ideas why they would be updating their image index so infrequently? Could it be because of the size of the files they are dealing with?
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
They have some bugs to work out. A search on "to be or not to be" typically produces from 2 to 3 error results in the first ten. That is, if you search on the phrase (including quotes) you get page results that do not contain the phrase.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I am pretty happy with the outcome of this story. Good on google for answering the allegations. Even when they must reveal some disparaging facts about their image search by doing so.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
/. is always so quick to jump on anything that screams vast right wing conspiracy... and this time they got egg on their face. GOOD.
If you do a google image search for "www.google.com", one of the first results you get is an image of Alyson Hannigan. That image resides on my server.
I havent the foggiest idea how that image got associated with the string "www.google.com", no why it would be ranked so high. I havent linked to that image directly in over a year, and only on a page that Google shouldnt be trowling for images anyhow.
BTW, a good 70% of the traffic to my server is people looking for that image.
I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".
It isn't that the Bush administration told Google to remove the photos and then Google did it? I mean, when I saw that I was like "Yeah, that must be it. No doubt about it. That's gotta be it. There is no other possibility."
Rob Malda is well over 14 -- Posting shit like that is embarrassing. Does he think it's cool?
Its better than trying to hide their mistakes. No matter what a company does today, they're going to get crap for it. So, let's say they don't they blame it on some obscure thing, or the DMCA or something equally idiotic. Then, all our friends here on /. jump up and say "That's so stoopid! My buddy and I could do a better job with a beowulf cluster!" But, when the company is transparent, as we like them to be, then we rail on them again for not being as cool as we thought they were.
How does their explanation account for the fact that the pictures WERE available; but have since been removed?
Re:Google just sucks (Score:2)
by l0ungeb0y (442022) on Sunday November 07, @01:35PM (#10747505)
(http://www.musecube.com/l0ungeb0y/ | Last Journal: Monday February 09, @06:38PM)
No, that's not the case at all. Google had plenty of Abu Ghraib pics not too long ago. Now they are gone.
But a month or so ago google couldn't find those images. I wanted to use one as port of an argument here on slashdot. So I fired up altavista.com for the first time in a couple of years. Altavista.com had no trouble finding the images. My conclusion was that google had made a decision to deep-six the links to those images.
Google's servers are probably too busy indexing text to spend much time on images. A couple of weeks ago I started setting up a Vioxx information site and I submitted my URL to Google for indexing, not expecting the pages to show up in the index for quite a while. The GoogleBot made its first appearance one day after my site went live, and it showed up in the index just a couple of days after that. I bet they're just not devoting horsepower to it trying to keep up with the normal text stuff.
EricHow to detect Firefox
It originally started with Google, but I sent a message requesting they removed them, and I'll be damned if they didn't graciously comply! Now Google no longer had record of those images, but Yahoo must have taken a copy of their archives when those two severed ties, because I saw refernces from Yahoo for things like "bigass.jpg" and "passedout.jpg". Imagine my joy... I was getting 404's out the bigass.jpg, and Yahoo wouldn't listen to me to take me out of their image index... Now, after several more months (and several dirty tricks), I no longer am included in Yahoo's index.
Does it stop there? No. Someone, somewhere along the way got a copy of those image thumbs out to every two bit search engine wannabe. To this day I still field 404's for stuff that I know had only been searched and indexed by Google, but has since found it's way via 3rd party routes into corners of the web I cannot begin to fully comprehend. *sigh* It's like a gnat bussing around my head... It's not hurting anything, I guess... but it's still annoying.
These days, I put the content="NOARCHIVE" meta tag on every web page I serve. It's not that I don't want visitors. I could deny them with a robots.txt exclusion to that end. I just feel that search engines still lack the ability to capture the nuance of what it is I do... And these days, it has nothing to do with bigass.jpg or images of drunks passing out.
(Not that those aren't fun things...)
Google doesn't index as thoroughly or as often as Yahoo, a search engine that's trying very hard to increase their search capabilities and that includes image searching.
I have one small personal site and administer my company's (very basic) site, and Google doesn't index my personal site at all, versus Yahoo which has about 75 pages indexed (and some page come in on the top of a keyword search). Our company site receives search hits because we pay Google. If we didn't, nothing would be indexed. Image search for this site is also way, way behind (as in 6-12 months).
Google is great but Yahoo is catching up fast. The logs of my personal site show Yahoo's spider crawling it on a daily basis. Google is never there. I've complained to Google about not even being indexed on Google when Yahoo has me in several top 10 search results, but nothing has changed.
Google has photos of aussie PM howard dated march 2004 - archive.wn.com/2004/ 03/13/1400/aboriginenews/ is one link that shows when i search images for http://images.google.com.au/images?q=john+howard&h l=en as a random example.
this is clearly the same timeframe as abu grahib, anecdotally i do not believe the "old index" line at all.
its not the first time that google has made content unavailable. dont forget they are helping the chinese govt to censor as part of dealings there.
nor do i accept that only an algorithm decides - one cant tell from a URL or any HTTP header data AFAIK whether a site is dynamic or not, apart from checking dates for currency. and to start abdicating responsibility for computer behaviour to the computer itself is really quite dangerous, socially speaking.
google is not god, its only as ethical as the humans that control it.
4,285,199,774 pages is what they say they index. That's a 32 bit number and one that has been pretty much UNCHANGED for an entire year. People don't seem to bother google about the 32 bit thing much at all either. .. but THINK for a moment!
If they are stalled at the 32 bit limit and a simple webpage contains just 1.01 images... then they are grinding up against a selection issue. No, its not just money, but as simple algebra shows there would have to be MASSIVE problems selecting which images to update.
Multiply this hypothetical problem with just the distractions created by 'hearding brilliant people' and the plausible distractions of 'satisfying goverment and datamining requests' and pretty soon the stack will be full, pushing the plausible todo list item of '64 bit indexing' down the stack.
Thus.. while, sure, you can simplify this all to 'bandwidth costs money', I put forth that such a simplification is shortsighted. System complexity does not increase in a linear fashion and given that google is 'old enough' to have its systems grow to stress out and magnify whatever shortcomings went into and on top of an originally simple model I bet that slow image search updates are merely a symptom of a much deeper, much simpler than 'money' design hitch which the system that is google.. e.g. the tech/ brains/ people-know-how is a a loss to properly address in a radical way as, with an 'image' to maintain it has become much harder for them to transcend the limits of the 'google-system' and to effectively address the root of the 32 bit problem.
so, yes.. google's number of indexed pages has publically been at the 32 bit limit for a good year.
yes, the hot air and geek dreams projected on the 'google system' have kept anyone from noticing and only now that its impacting the expectations of some folks are people noticing reality. impacted as they are by 'money' they of course project the problem to be solvable by 'money'.
Systemantics dictates that its an inability to maintain self-transcendence which has kept them to keep from having the 32 bit limit catching them with their pants down.
pesky dot 64 dot cl at spamgourmet dot com
Huh? I was taught that it was God-Father's (Yahweh's) wish that God-Son (Jesus) were sent to Earth to die by torture. This is depicted by graphical, three-dimensional, images in every Roman-Catholic church and around many Catholic homes and even by images hanging around their necks. And, as you imply, also depicted in Mel Gibson's movie.
Of course, Yahweh didn't order the Romans to torture Jesus, but He could, by His merest wish, enlighten the Roman soldiers on how abhorrent torture is. As many tests demonstrate, intelligence varies a lot between humans, so perhaps, if God were just a little bit more explicit in His teachings, maybe a lot of humans woudn't be so eager to torture each other?...
"above-average intellect and critical judgment."
Ha ha ha, dream on pal.
Why were so many Slashdot readers willing to swallow the original farcical Google story hook, line and sinker? Was it their above-par critical thinking skills?
As for Cmdr Taco, 10 minutes' worth of followup investigation would have cleared the issue up before it got posted. Instead he assumed the Bush administration was behind it. Did he do it because he was a big fan the Bush administration? Hey, I'm no fan of Bush either, but he has a responsibility to investigate this stuff BEFORE posting it.
This is just another sorry episode in Slashdot's embarrassing journalistic track record.
But none of the results that google search are links to the pictures of her wearing this dress
I think they know if start playing back room politics people will very quickly move to another search engine. It's a rare thing today to see a big company doing the right thing, and Google is one of them.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Yeah. Maybe you slashdot editors should do a little investigating before you start posting uninvestigated speculation as news. *cough*FOXNEWS*cough*DRUDGEREPORT*cough*
Seriously. It took, what, all of a few hours for the truth to out? But no. You couldn't wait.
Pfft.
vk.
I may indeed be overestimating average intellect here if people can't identify the most blatantly obvious sarcasm...
I'm not so sure I'm convinced. For one, if this story broke around March/April, how come other March/April news stories have already found their way back into the index? ( Such as this item from 'The Age', found with a search for 'John Howard', our PM ). Second, do you honestly think that all the PFC. England photos in the index during this earlier period were all hosted on various news-wires?
I dunno if Google has done anything dodgy here, but it's all bit weird to say the least. I might start using another image searcher that's a bit more up to date.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Wow. I guess some of that Preussian dicipline was still present in the Wehrmacht and hadn't been done away with by the Nazis.
The flipside is that Norwegians were also members of the master race. If that happened to a slav or a Jew, and the commander had done the same thing, he could have been demoted or worse...
What many people forget is that some of the Allied forces, part of that noble generation that I still thank for liberating us, also commited war crimes, shot surrendering Axis troops and so on. They weren't prosecuted. On the top level, the generals were guilty of bombing purely civilian targets. If a Forward Air Controller makes a mistake or the guided bomb lands next door it's bloddy murder, while the firebombing of Dresden is mostly forgotten. Yes, we talk about Hiroshima and Nagasak, that's natural because a new weapon was used, and because our parents spent the cold war with the nuclear threat hanging over them.
But they forgot that the war to end all wars seldom is, and letting our allies get away with war crimes could set a precedent for future wars.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Shamelessly karma whoring ....... here ya go,
:-)
To get this result, you need to image search for Morgan Webb Nude, and click on the link at the bottom containing omitted results.
You're welcome.
I've noticed that Yahoo is much better at indexing personal sites. I do remember that Google had to spend some resources to downplay the blogging effect and the dramatic rise in search ratings when bloggers would all link to terms and links. A side effect of that is that booth my website and my friend's site about a dog is thoroughly searched by Yahoo, but google ignores both.
If you blog it...
More importantly whatever happened to those second batch of pictures that were supposed to be released "sooner rather then later"
evil is as evil does
"The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004 (and officially became a non-story on November 2, 2004)"
With White House counsel Alberto Gonzales--a figure central to the internal discussion of 'when is it not torture' at the White House--on a very short list of Supreme Court nominees, this issue may very well flare up again sooner rather than later.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
I agree with you on all points except that I believe it's evident that the Slashdot editors don't read the material they post. Otherwise they may have grown intellectually along with everybody else.
Slashdot is now exclusively about ad-revenue and click-throughs. Proof can be seen every weekend when story-after-story is nothing more than an exercise in money grubbing. It's certainly nothing whatsoever to do with News for Nerds. Stuff that matters anymore.