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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!
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.
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/. 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.
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.
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!
"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!