Google: We Didn’t Censor Aboutrika’s Gaza T-Shirt Photo

Google’s Matt Cutts has lent his personal blog to the Google Images search
team so they could

debunk a rumor that Google censored an image of an Egyptian football player,
Mohammad Aboutrika, stripping off his team jersey during the African Cup Of
Nations to show a "Sympathize With Gaza" T-shirt underneath. No censoring, says
Google — it was just a problem with Google Images being stale. I can totally
believe that explanation. It’s just embarrassing that it’s the same explanation
Google gave when a similar question over Google Images came up in 2004. Over
four years later, you’d expect the image freshness issues to have been resolved
by now.

Let’s go backwards, then we’ll come up to date. In November 2004, after the
Abu Ghraib prisoner torture scandal erupted, people went looking for images on
Google Images. Pictures weren’t to be found, making some
such as
Slashdot wonder if censorship was involved.

No censorship, Google said. It

passed along a message from no less than Sergey Brin himself on the matter:

In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed [sic] that our image
index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the
near future.

In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib
photos] [abu graib photos] [google.com] to get plenty of what you are looking
for.

Google Images was out of date, it turned out — several months out of date.
But that fueled even more questions. How come the pictures WERE showing up
there, then disappeared, as John Battelle
wondered:

I don’t quite understand how things that were once there (according to
those on the thread mentioned above) fell out.

I followed up on that aspect with Google at the time, and the explanation
was that Google News and Google Images have their own separate databases.
However, what’s in the Google News images database can also be found in Google
Images. The Abu Ghraib pictures from Google News were showing up in Google
Images for the time period Google News keeps images stored (Google never told me
how long this was, but I figured for maybe a week or two). Once the images were
dropped from Google News, there was a lag until Google Images itself actually
stored them.

Now to the recent post from Google:

It turns out this

image was difficult to find on
images.google.com for the first few days after the match, and the story
that’s gathered steam is that Google removed it. Some outlets said that this
was under pressure from the Israeli government.

First of all, let’s put the story straight: we definitely didn’t do this. In
fact, from the very beginning you could find the image quite easily on

YouTube and also on

Google News.

The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that
it can take a few days between when an image appears and when it’s crawled by
the Googlebot, as explained
here. It’s
there now – you can find several copies of the image on a search for [Aboutrika]
or [Aboutrika
Gaza] quite easily.

OK, first it sounds like Google News still has a separate images database
(which is why the pictures were there) but that Google Images no longer taps
into it at all. If not, you wonder why. You’d think Google would know at this
point that people are going to turn to Google Images for news image-related content.
Heck, over at Ask.com, you can do searches there and even get in the right-hand
column "News Image" matches coming up.

Second — I know Google Images doesn’t have a blog, but Google itself does —
and this post belongs there, not on Matt’s personal blog. That’s part of what
the Google Blog is supposed to be
doing, so repost this over there, Google.

To conclude, over three years later, the "we’re just behind" explanation
doesn’t work so well. No, I don’t think things are being censored. But now
Google takes a second strike over the issue of image censorship for exactly the
same reason.

For the record, I thought it was worth checking the other search engines. Yahoo
has one image

here; Microsoft

here, though the image has been removed and shows a broken image
placeholder. Ask

shows nothing. Also, when the image wasn’t showing at Google, it also wasn’t
showing at Yahoo, for at least one person

who bothered to check. While Google may have looked bad for being stale,
it was hardly alone.