Florida was great, thanks to all who asked, but it’s nice to be back in the Fall weather of Northern California. We start up the Searchblogging again with this interesting post from Slashdot regarding the troubling Abu Ghraib images:
Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie’s boyfriend charles graner and note how you don’t get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread.”
Turns out, though, that all this really was, according to Sergey Brin, was an embarrassing shortfall in Google’s indexing process – essentially, he copped to Google only updating its image search every six months, given that the images hit back in early summer.
I don’t quite understand how things that were once there (according to those on the thread mentioned above) fell out, but…here’s what Sergey posted:
In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed 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.