GOOGLE YESTERDAY apologised over an offensive image of Michelle Obama with monkey features which had appeared when web users searched for pictures of the US first lady.
The digitally altered image had appeared as the top search result when the words “Michelle Obama” were put into the Google Images search engine, and was posted on a blog hosted by the Google-owned blog service, Blogger.
Yesterday, the blog’s owner removed the image and displayed an apology in Chinese with a very loose English translation.
Google had refused to remove the image from its picture search listings, despite complaints that it was racist, instead opting to run an ad next to it explaining its policy on how search engine results work. In a statement in the advert, the company said its results “can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries”.
“We apologise if you’ve had an upsetting experience using Google,” it said. “Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.”
A spokesman for Google said the blog and image might still appear in Google Images searches, but it was coming out of the search engine’s indexing system. Google warned the image could easily reappear in its listings if another blog posted it. It is not the first time Google has published explanation ads against search queries. In 2004, when the word “Jew” returned anti-Semitic results, Google responded the same way. – (Guardian service)