Google Pulls Obama Photo
This week Google went against their normal procedures and removed an offensive picture of Michelle Obama from its image search facility.
Normally Google will not remove images or pages because they cause offense. They issued a statement saying that they do not endorse racism but that:
‘We do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the image, page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the image.’
It is obvious that these guidelines would not require that the First Lady’s image be taken off.
However the reason that Google gave for removing the image was that the site it came from contained malware. Matt Cutts said:
Google’s Matt Cutts, said on the Search Engine Roundtable that the site hosting the Obama photo was not safe and contradicted Google guidelines.
‘… that page did violate our webmaster guidelines because it was serving malware to users, which violates the quality guideline that says ‘Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.’ I believe that the Images team did a general anti-malware sweep.’
And ironically the main site that hosts the picture can still be reached via Google search.
Its interesting that we sometimes look to large companies to lead when it comes to ethics. Last week we reported that Google are likely to win against Louis Vuitton who are trying to stop other companies from using their trade name in their keyword campaigns even though some of these companies sell illegal copies of Vuitton goods. On the other hand, whatever reasons they may give, here Google have obviously pulled a racist picture from their image search.
Tags: keyword campaign