Be Excellent To Each Other

Should Google have 'apologised'?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8377922.stm

I don't understand* - what's racially offensive about this picture?



* I just ctrl-v that these days

I don't really have an opinion on the apology; it's theirs to give, if they choose, whether justified or not. I'm glad they're sticking to their own rules on not excluding the image, though.

It's this one, apparently:

Well, this is interesting.

I had a look to see what this image was, first thing this morning. It was Michelle Obama photo-manipulated to look like part human, part chimp. It was the first image result in both google.co.uk images and the .com version.

Now, I have just checked both and it isn't on any of the first five pages.

How has that happened so quickly?

It's this one, apparently:

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Aye, that's the one I saw this morning. It's gone now, though.

Oh, I see. The BBC page was, as ever, badly written.

It's a bit offensive, but then Google don't filter results, so meh. What's the story?

The image has been pulled from the blog (also hosted by Google -- blogger.com) that posted it, so it's being removed from the Google Images index now. No doubt Google is rushing the removal faster than usual, which I don't think there is any harm in.

Really? Oh well that makes sense I guess. I wonder if it was Google or the Blogger that removed the picture? I'm glad it's gone, because it's horrible, but at the same time I guess I think the Google engine should work as 'naturally' as possible.

See, as a result of this, when the face-changing monkey-people from Mars are taking over the US, we will automatically surpress all evidence of it ourselves! No forward planning there, Google. YOU'VE DOOMED US ALL. Political correctness gone mad, I tell you. Etc.

It was the poster who removed the image. Google's stance (correct, in my opinion) was that the image wasn't illegal so they wouldn't do anything to it, either on the blog or in the image index.

Thank god for that. We are safe for now from the Chameleonic Photoshop Monsters.

There's an image of her being persecuted by a Klan member on page 5 of the image results though.

Google Image search for "Michelle Obama Monkey" and you get a picture of Michelle Obama shopped with a monkey. Fucking shocker.

Yes, but this morning, if you Google (not Image) searched for "michelle obama" you got a picture of Michelle Obama shopped with a monkey in the "Image Results" bit. Which is a very different scenario.

Those two things seem to contradict each other if I understand you correctly, though. (Meaning that you see no harm in rushing the re-indexing and then that you think they are correct not to 'fiddle' with the re-indexing).

What determines the ranking of image searches, then? Is it some super-secret-sauce algorithm known only to Google, or is it something simple which they can have an effect on?

Possibly true, but then "Googling yourself only leads to unhappiness" will always be true.

Naturally I searched for 'Craster Monkey' (bought up nothing) then Mimi Monkey which led me to this

MIchelle Obama? I'm sorry and all that but having just discovered the rather attractive French newsreader Melissa Theuriau I'd rather google her. You can do it yourself. She's very pretty ;-)

I sincerely apologise to Gaywood, Myps, /\1ß|ñ(), Dimrill, An Dave, Grim..., Craster, markg and Kovey for all the pictures I have done of them and I hope I have not caused any offence.

Super-secret-sauce algorithm.

What about me, you cunt!

Google refused to manually pull the image from their index, which I think is correct. However, with the image gone, it could be weeks before the algorithm (left to its own devices) notices and removes it -- basically however long it takes for the program to re-crawl that site. The speed with which this has vanished suggests Google might have manually told it to crawl that page right now (something you can do yourself with some tool tucked away on one of their pages, mind you). To my mind, that's not inappropriate, given the negative PR this is generating. Google have only improved the timeliness of one part of their index, not fiddled with the innards of how that index is generated.

Super-secret-sauce, as with all their algorithms. If people knew how it worked they could use that knowledge to game the algorithm and boost their search rankings.

Fair enough - but I was wondering if it Images worked anything like regular Google, where you can whack in a load of key words to bump up your ranking (can't you?)

I didn't alter your pic.

I believe that's a Zing!

That's nothing. If you Google for Ryan Giggs's Dad, you get a picture of a gorilla.

There's no way he's only 36. He was about 30 when I was 10, and that'd make me… oh shut up.

I remember him bursting onto the scene in about 1989, and he was about 17 then. Ryan Giggs, that is; not his Dad.

Is that sauce also more commonly known as money?

I remember, clear as fucking day, a stop motion type Reebok advert where Giggs got captured and an evil Giggs was sent to replace him. I must have been about 18 as I was at the cinema with a lass called Katie when I saw it and she was dead fit and from a very proper family and all but she got married in the end as shit like that happens and you grow up and move on and all but I can't for the life of me find that EVIL RYAN GIGGS thing. Even his agent ignored my emails.

It's not racist because white people look like monkeys too:

You're saying it don't matter if you're black or white, GY.

Awesome person has pointed me towards this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124425/

Someone find me a video of this.

Now.

Aside from my jocular Ian Brown postage however, it almost baffles me that there are people in the world who still think "ha ha! Black people = monkeys!" - and as YouTubed coverage of far-right pre-US-election rallies show, it's not a one-off. Even if they're on the American far right. If I slammed a brick into the side of my head repeatedly for ten whole minutes, I could possibly get into a temporary mindset of "aah, so that's why some racist idiots think all Muslims are secret terrorists", but the monkey thing? It almost makes me tempted to have all my skin tattooed green, just so I don't have to be associated with a race capable of thinking such a thing.

Not that the whole thing is restricted to bigoted American fucks, of course. I'm going to stick my neck out here, and suspect I'm not the only forum member who dies a little bit inside every time they get an email headed "FW: White and proud" from an actual blood relative*.

(*It's the one which says things like "Oh, so there's BET, Black Entertainment Television... but if there was a W.E.T., it'd be banned!" THERE ISN'T A W.E.T. CHANNEL BECAUSE PRETTY MUCH EVERY CHANNEL IS ALMOST ENTIRELY A WHITE ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL, YOU FUCKING IDIOTS! WHITE PEOPLE IN THE UK ARE NOT A FUCKING MINORITY, SO STOP TRYING TO ACT LIKE ONE FOR FUCK'S SAKE. AND WHILE B.E.T. IS A RELATIVELY POPULAR CABLE NETWORK IN THE USA, IT'S VERY MUCH A MINORITY CONCERN IN THE UK, SO YOUR INFERRED REFERENCE IS UTTERLY INVALID ANYWAY. YOU FUCKING MORON."**)

(**A thing I'm too cowardly to actually put in my reply to said blood relative, there. I generally use the slightly more polite "Erm, yeah. Don't send me any more of this shit, okay" as a reply.)

Wow, Daniel Craig looks shit without makeup, doesn't he?

Would.

Also, I think my life would be easier if my customers were as evolved as monkeys.