Google Image Index Just Not Updated 411
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.
Why so long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's got some bugs to work out (Score:4, Interesting)
slashdot accomplishes something! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google's got some bugs to work out (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Old index indeed... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Did they think before they spoke? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:2, Interesting)
The same reason we buy hot coffee and iced soda -- there isn't much of a market for moderate viewpoints or tepid drinks.
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
OK. Then explain why Alexandra Kerry's Cannes pho (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why so long? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [vioxx-laws...tions.info] 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 [ericgiguere.com]
Not Just A Google Thing- (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I can vouch for this (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Pesky 32 bit limit (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:non-story? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:non-story? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:OK. Then explain why Alexandra Kerry's Cannes p (Score:3, Interesting)
But none of the results that google search are links to the pictures of her wearing this dress [yimg.com]
High expectations from Google (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
No offense, but DUH. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously. It took, what, all of a few hours for the truth to out? But no. You couldn't wait.
Pfft.
Re:non-story? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
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' [google.com], 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.
YLFIRe:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Huh what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Here's some Morgan Webb...... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [yahoo.com] and my friend's site about a dog [yahoo.com] is thoroughly searched by Yahoo, but google ignores [google.com] both [google.com].
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Abu Ghraib a non-story? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Where's The Apology?? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why so long? (Score:3, Interesting)
1) As you say, this could potentionally be a huge index.
2) The software methods are probably still being played with.
3) Perhaps the value of the index itself in question. For example, Google probably does not want to index all the porn ads, gif edges, etc. Think about number 1 again. This could be a potentional resource sink. I don't know if Google has made a cost-benefit relationship out of this one yet, so refreshing the index may be viewed as a waste.
4) Images are more controversial than text. Google has a public image now.
Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Therefore the women who have abortions should be charged with murder and jailed. Doctors who perform abortions should be charged with conspiracy and jailed. Women who give birth to defected children because they drank, smoked or did drugs should be charged with attempted murder and jailed. Women who have miscarriages due to over exertion or other acts should be charged with negligent homocide or manslaughter and jailed.
The thing is that nobody is advocating these positions. That means the people who are pro life don't themselves see this as murder. In their minds the fetus is not actually a human being but some sort of a proto being, a potential for life but not life itself. If they actually believed the fetus was a human being they would push for murder charges for the mother.