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

Why so long?

[moofdaddy]

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?

slashdot accomplishes something!

[BortQ]

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.

Re:Google's got some bugs to work out

[skraps]

They also consider the text of links that point to a particular page. The search terms don't need to appear on the page.

Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

[mrbrown1602]

/. is always so quick to jump on anything that screams vast right wing conspiracy... and this time they got egg on their face. GOOD.

Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

[VistaBoy]

Haha...whoops.

For instance, if we don't believe abortion is right as a form of birth control, but we believe that homosexuals deserve to have some form of union, who do we vote for in our current political system? I think the worthy compromise would be to allow gay civil-unions with the same amount of rights as a marriage (just not using the M-word so religious people don't get pissed off). Then we can ban abortion except in cases that not performing an abortion would result in the death of the mother. Since we'd have a bunch of unwanted babies from this decision, we could put them up for adoption, which would then be adopted by the gay couples and have a good home. But we don't hear compromises like this from our two-party system.

Most of the time, you can solve two or more issues simultaneously using a compromise. The Constitution was made through compromises, but there's so much polarization in our current system of politics that I doubt anything could get accomplished if a group of people tried to sit down and make a new Constitution. Just look at Congress for how fucked-up modern politics have gotten...we have the "party dominance" in Congress making decisions for the American people. We have partisan bills that leave only one side satisfied instead of both parties sitting down and making a bill that would satisfy both sides through compromise.

Old index indeed...

[Rgb465]

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.

Not Just A Google Thing-

[flushtwice]

I run a web server from home and can see all the referring logs from visitors. Back in the beginning I used to have some joke pictures such as "bigass.jpg" and "passedout.jpg" but as time went on I started to consider the IP laws that could affect me. Those images were removed nearly a year ago, but they still live on in deadlink thumbnails.

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...)

Re:I can vouch for this

[fontkick]

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.

Re:non-story?

[mangu]

Jesus's expectations of not torturing people

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?...

Re:Huh what?

[GQuon]

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.

Abu Ghraib a non-story?

[pjt48108]

"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.