LOS ANGELES (YBH.ME) - A controversy has erupted today over an image of First Lady Michelle Obama with an ape face. A search for Michelle Obama will return the image as the number one result in Google if you search for her image in a certain way.
First Lady Michelle Obama
It turns out folks who are searching on Google who have turned their “SafeSearch” setting to “off” likely will not see the image in question because that setting lets a greater array of images, ranked in terms of what is likely to be desired by the user, to be returned in the search. Removing the “SafeSearch” setting ends up with unfiltered – unedited, if you will -searches. Anyone who is filtering searches, generally to avoid adult sites popping up on a family computer, will, oddly, get the Michelle Obama image. It is not clear why the filters being off drops the Michelle Obama photoshop “chimp” image.
From Google’s support page:
- Moderate filtering excludes most explicit images from Google Image Search results but doesn’t filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you’ll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
- Strict filtering applies SafeSearch filtering to all your search results (i.e. both image search and ordinary web search).
The image has caused a furor since turning up on a site on November 19, on which malware was posted. The site was taken down, per Google policy. The image popped up again on November 23, on a site whose content was within Google webmaster guidelines.
Google removes pages themselves, but also has a mechanism for requesting page removals from the search index; if approved, such pages are removed for 6 months. The policy is defined clearly. Their webmaster guidelines do not allow web sites ranked in their search results to promote malicious behavior like phishing or installing viruses. However, without such nefarious activity, Google is not going to censor results.
In 2006 Google used ad space when search results pranksters took on George W. Bush. When a user typed “miserable failure” as a search term, the top result was President Bush’s official White House biography.
