Google Image Search Bug Leads To Duplicate Russian Auto Accident Images In Search Results

This morning, for a few hours, searchers looking for images using Google Image search were presented with an image of a Russian automobile accident in the search results. Searching for dogs to cats, screen shots to flowers and diapers to pornography were all presented with the same image of an accident in Russia.

The issue was resolved within hours but the question of what happened and why is still unknown.

Google told us “Oops–speaking of accidents, we’ve fixed it! We apologize.” “The least we could have done was show everyone micropigs instead,” joked the Google spokesperson. But Google would not confirm that this was some sort of hack or bug within their software.

Google did say in the help forums that this was “a technical issue on our end.”

It could have easily been a bug with the image search algorithm or someone spamming the search results, but only Google would know.

In any event, the issue is now resolved. Here is a screen shot of the issue but you can see more screen shots in this Google Help Thread.