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Google Image Index Just Not Updated
Posted by
michael
on Sun Nov 07, 2004 05:45 PM
from the breaking-news dept.
from the breaking-news dept.
We ran a story earlier today about the lack of Abu Ghraib photos in Google's image index. We now have a response from Google stating that the image index simply hasn't been updated recently, as well as a fairly convincing demonstration from a Slashdot reader: Rahga writes "I put together a page that counters the 'Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images' story. It is the tale of a Morgan Webb picture on images.google.com that's been driving a ton of traffic to my webserver 7 months after it was removed." The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004 (and officially became a non-story on November 2, 2004), so Google's index is indeed quite far behind.
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Google Image Index Just Not Updated
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I can vouch for this (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.metlin.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 20, @01:58PM)
For the longest time, the search for my name on Google images would bring up really old images and it would never update them. So, in order to test this, I just removed those images and used a redirect (this was about 3-4 months ago) -- Google still did not update the pictures.
However, my academic page at my school did show up pretty soon, although it was created just recently. What more, it even showed the image of my latest schedule, and not an earlier one as in the other case.
So I guess Google probably uses some kinda weird algorithm to determine which sites are likely to be dynamic, and which are not -- and update/not update them accordingly.
Besides, everytime there's been a problem/censorship (say, due to DMCA) -- Google has been nice enough to notify the users during the search. Not to mention the amount of scalability doing something like this would require of them (which makes even less sense if they were the ONLY ones asked to do so).
So all in all, just a false alarm, I suppose.
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:5, Interesting)
I have one small personal site and administer my company's (very basic) site, and Google doesn't index my personal site at all, versus Yahoo which has about 75 pages indexed (and some page come in on the top of a keyword search). Our company site receives search hits because we pay Google. If we didn't, nothing would be indexed. Image search for this site is also way, way behind (as in 6-12 months).
Google is great but Yahoo is catching up fast. The logs of my personal site show Yahoo's spider crawling it on a daily basis. Google is never there. I've complained to Google about not even being indexed on Google when Yahoo has me in several top 10 search results, but nothing has changed.
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://wolgamott.blogspot.com/)
I've noticed that Yahoo is much better at indexing personal sites. I do remember that Google had to spend some resources to downplay the blogging effect and the dramatic rise in search ratings when bloggers would all link to terms and links. A side effect of that is that booth my website [yahoo.com] and my friend's site about a dog [yahoo.com] is thoroughly searched by Yahoo, but google ignores [google.com] both [google.com].
Re:Can you say dupe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because in journalism there's a tradition of printing retractions for mistakes made on page A1 on a future page A1 in order to give the takeback as much exposure as the mistake. Slashdot leveled a rather serious charge of censorship against Google that quickly was proven not to be true.
Furthermore, there's a new piece of news coming out of this mess: Google's being quite slow on the refresh of the image search database.
Just because Slashdot says it doesn't make it true (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's image search is not to be confused with Google's news search. If you search for Lyndie England against the news search, one of the pictures in question comes up in a thumbnail next to the first set of results. Google had plently of coverage of the Abu Ghraib story on its news pages, and its web search also has plenty of coverage of the topic. If Google was intentionally censoring, you think they woulda tagged all their search engines in the process.
For Google to be 6-months or more behind on reindexing their image storage to me seems about right. The link rot on the image search is starting to get annoying, but we've seen worse from the likes of Alta Vista in the past. Webcrawling seems simple but it's a very bandwidth intense process, and that means it costs money. Image spidering is even more expensive because pictures take up a whole lot more bitspace than HTML docs.
So, move that Slashdot story from earlier today from the Censorship category to the Almighty Buck category. That's the real reason why the pictures weren't there.
Re:Just because Slashdot says it doesn't make it t (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, just the opposite. An inaccurate story was posted, and it was torn apart by the comments. The hive-mind that is slashdot preformed quite well, IMHO.
Re:Just because Slashdot says it doesn't make it t (Score:4, Informative)
(https://addons.mozil...&application=firefox)
I've noticed that the google images search seems to catalog two distinct kinds of pics: the high-turnover images from high traffic sites (mostly news sites), and the deep spidering of essentially random images from all the other sites. Since news-type sites have a lot of "churn", google re-spiders them frequently and the images search database gets updated for those sites fairly regularly. All other sites are pretty much just "when the spider gets around to it". It's not surprising that the Abu Ghraib pics would "fall off" the images index when the news sites moved on to the next titilating scandal of the week, and the slow-ass "rest of the 'net" image spider has a half-year-plus lag time in updating old entries. So you can't find Abu Ghraib pics. You also can't find "Alexandra Kerry in her black dress at Cannes" pics. But you can find plenty of pics of Paula Radcliffe, the marathon runner, running with the Union Jack and wearing number 576, even though those pics are under a day old. Good luck finding those same pics of her in a week though!
Why so long? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.wikiafterdark.com/)
Google's got some bugs to work out (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Google's got some bugs to work out (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:where does it say this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The top result is SCO. Do you REALLY think they would have that in text anywhere on their site?
Rights? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when does google have to do anything other than what they wish?
Lame...
dogpile.com? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday May 30 2003, @08:04PM)
It is a fairly minimialist search engine that searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, LookSmart, Overture and FindWhat. I tried it a few times and find it occasionally returns a few more useful results than Google, and doesn't have an annoying clutter of ads.
(I supposed if it did I wouldn't know, I have mozilla configured to block even flash ads, and my firewall is configured to route most known ad servers to 127.0.0.1)
Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday November 03 2004, @08:16PM)
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ensilzah.deviantart.com/)
The sky is falling!
Oh wait.
Nevermind.
non-story? (Score:5, Informative)
maybe the mass media isn't covering the prision over there in the sandy beach, but it's not all quiet, and definately deserves attention of those not deployed over there.
americans are still dying every day in that prision (which is controled by the americans). american troops are deployed in and around that prision sometimes for months at a time with no productive mission other than to be deployed so a general or such can get another stripe on their shirt. this is what our tax dollars are being used for.
there's units that have their own cooks but can't use them due to contracts with another food supply "company". what are these cooks doing? not a damn thing. there's people who are budgeted for a years deployment, but have replacements aready there. what happens to these troops? they get re-deployed to another closer area. these aren't the full time troops either, these are the reservists who are being forced to sit on their arse in the desert.
by the way, there's policy in abu-grabib now that photos MUST have faces digitally distorted. meaning if a solder takes a photo of someone who's leg has been blown off, make sure there's no face in the picture. i'm not even sure if they're aloud to send photos out w/o permission these days.
sign up folks, it's in the name of democracy after all.
Re:non-story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, excellent comparison. Fox also allows critical discussion of the news in situ. Fox also updates erroneus news with immediate apologies. Last but not least, Fox viewers are also of above-average intellect and critical judgment.
the original story was just a ploy by Taco to bash US policy
Who had the tendency towards conspiracy theories again?
Re:non-story? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://jacob.steenhagen.us/ | Last Journal: Monday April 07 2003, @03:58PM)
First, the nit-picky part. I believe you meant to say "so a general or such can get another star on their shirt" as Generals in the Army (or any US branch, for that matter) don't wear stripes but instead wear stars. You see, stripes are worn by the enilisted soldiers that actually do the real work yet don't get anywhere near officer's pay.
Now for the meat of that paragraph. American's die every day in this prison? Wow... I wasn't aware of that. In fact, I'm only aware of 2 fatailies since I've got here in March (one Marine in April and one civilian recently). We have had some injuries... one even really serious, but that's it as far as American causulaties at his prison.
Amazingly enough, the first part of this paragraph I actually agree with. I think it's absurd that the government pays KBR 10 times (possibly exagerated, probably not) what they'd pay a soldier who's already trained to do a job. Our company alone brought numerous cooks, but we still have civilians doing all the cooking. That's not to say that cooks are doing nothing. Some are in "supervisor" postions inside these civilian run DEFACs and others have been given other tasks to do that don't relate to cooking but still need to be done.
And about being re-deployed to another closer area because your replacements are there but you're still budgeted for deployment. BS. I will not give specific numbers as those are, quite frankly, none of your buisness, but I can tell you that the majority of soldiers who got here in February '04 are still here. Some have been sent south to a prison faclity near the Kuwait border and some have gone home (either individuals for individual reasons or a few that had neared their "2 years in 5" deployment mark. Oh, and the nit-picky point here: "re-deployment" is the Army term for going back to the states. I know, it doesn't make much sense, but that's the way it is.
Believe it or not, this is not some policy they pulled out of thing air. To the best of my knowledge, the Geneva Convention prohibts taking pictures of Prisoners of War or Civilian Detainees with their faces visible as a personal momento. That seems logical to you, doesn't it? And for what it's worth, I can send pictures home without asking first.
But what do I know... it's not like I'm in a potion to know a single thing about Abu Ghraib prison.
slashdot accomplishes something! (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://sillysoft.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 24 2004, @02:50AM)
Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.mrbrown.net/)
Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Hooray. We got one up on the vast left wing conspiracy that is Slashdot, and who attempts to create myths about a vast right wing conspiracy that any right thinking American knows is just a communist, or foreign, or Jewish or Muslim conspiracy.
And this post itself is just a clever part of that. By appearing to parody the gianormous left wing conspiracy that is Slashdot we hope to persuade a few of the undecideds that there really isn't a massively enormously giganticly big LEFT WING CONSPIRACY to subvert and pervert and divert and distort the course of true Christian justice. Or was it Jewish justice or justice for people wih wheelchairs. Frankly I don't care. It does not make sense. And if it does not make sense, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, then you must acquit.
And one last thing. Gloating is so November 3.
Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two problems with our current state of politics:
I think someone needs to start a "Compromise" party so sensible people can vote. For instance, if we
Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
(http://jseliger.wordpress.com/)
finish our post...
Re:Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, if we don't believe abortion is right as a form of birth control, but we believe that homosexuals deserve to have some form of union, who do we vote for in our current political system? I think the worthy compromise would be to allow gay civil-unions with the same amount of rights as a marriage (just not using the M-word so religious people don't get pissed off). Then we can ban abortion except in cases that not performing an abortion would result in the death of the mother. Since we'd have a bunch of unwanted babies from this decision, we could put them up for adoption, which would then be adopted by the gay couples and have a good home. But we don't hear compromises like this from our two-party system.
Most of the time, you can solve two or more issues simultaneously using a compromise. The Constitution was made through compromises, but there's so much polarization in our current system of politics that I doubt anything could get accomplished if a group of people tried to sit down and make a new Constitution. Just look at Congress for how fucked-up modern politics have gotten...we have the "party dominance" in Congress making decisions for the American people. We have partisan bills that leave only one side satisfied instead of both parties sitting down and making a bill that would satisfy both sides through compromise.
Old index indeed... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.massassi.net/)
I havent the foggiest idea how that image got associated with the string "www.google.com", no why it would be ranked so high. I havent linked to that image directly in over a year, and only on a page that Google shouldnt be trowling for images anyhow.
BTW, a good 70% of the traffic to my server is people looking for that image.
The Slashdot story rules (Score:5, Funny)
Since the editors seem to have momentarily forgotten:
Huh what? (Score:5, Insightful)
To simpletons in the American electorate, that might be true. But, if anything, Nov 2nd made the story much more relevant to about a billion muslims who view it as proof positive that the current US government may talk a good story, but where it counts, in real life, their actions are a whole lot different.
Re:Huh what? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.michaelchaney.com/)
Compare this country to anywhere on earth. Go ahead. Some Israeli soldier put 20 bullets through the head of a 13-year-old girl (who had already been shot in the leg and was struggling to get away) last month and he got a reprimand for losing the confidence of his subordinates. That's par for the course.
When was the last time you heard of any other country that disciplined its military people for war crimes? Seriously.
I'm not saying the US Army is perfect, and I think that too many innocent people have died that could have been avoided. But you people act like it was a fucking frat party with Saddam in power until we came and messed it all up.
Making men do fake sex acts is disgusting, but compared to Saddam's meat grinder, electrocution rooms, chemical baths, Uday's iron maiden, and the rest of it, this seems a bit tame. And our soldiers are still facing charges over it. Which is how it should be.
But get a grip, people.
Re:Huh what? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Huh what? (Score:5, Insightful)
During WWII, under the german occupation of Norway, a girl was raped by a german soldier in my hometown Horten.
Some citizens complain to the Commander of the garrison there. Within days he had tracked down the guilty soldier. The following day the soldier was promptly executed publically in the town square.
Re:Huh what? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.etteroljen.no/ | Last Journal: Tuesday January 17 2006, @11:50AM)
The flipside is that Norwegians were also members of the master race. If that happened to a slav or a Jew, and the commander had done the same thing, he could have been demoted or worse...
What many people forget is that some of the Allied forces, part of that noble generation that I still thank for liberating us, also commited war crimes, shot surrendering Axis troops and so on. They weren't prosecuted. On the top level, the generals were guilty of bombing purely civilian targets. If a Forward Air Controller makes a mistake or the guided bomb lands next door it's bloddy murder, while the firebombing of Dresden is mostly forgotten. Yes, we talk about Hiroshima and Nagasak, that's natural because a new weapon was used, and because our parents spent the cold war with the nuclear threat hanging over them.
But they forgot that the war to end all wars seldom is, and letting our allies get away with war crimes could set a precedent for future wars.
Re:Huh what? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~babulicm)
You mean like in 1995, when Canada disbanded an entire regiment [wikipedia.org] and put soldiers on trial?
Your bluster just demonstrates that, like many Americans, you are profoundly ignorant about what goes on in the the rest of the world... or for that matter, right next door. Next you'll be telling us that europeans are lucky not to have experienced terrorism first hand. In fact, they've been living with it for more than 30 years. Ever hear of the IRA or Bader-Meinhof?
Not Just A Google Thing- (Score:4, Interesting)
It originally started with Google, but I sent a message requesting they removed them, and I'll be damned if they didn't graciously comply! Now Google no longer had record of those images, but Yahoo must have taken a copy of their archives when those two severed ties, because I saw refernces from Yahoo for things like "bigass.jpg" and "passedout.jpg". Imagine my joy... I was getting 404's out the bigass.jpg, and Yahoo wouldn't listen to me to take me out of their image index... Now, after several more months (and several dirty tricks), I no longer am included in Yahoo's index.
Does it stop there? No. Someone, somewhere along the way got a copy of those image thumbs out to every two bit search engine wannabe. To this day I still field 404's for stuff that I know had only been searched and indexed by Google, but has since found it's way via 3rd party routes into corners of the web I cannot begin to fully comprehend. *sigh* It's like a gnat bussing around my head... It's not hurting anything, I guess... but it's still annoying.
These days, I put the content="NOARCHIVE" meta tag on every web page I serve. It's not that I don't want visitors. I could deny them with a robots.txt exclusion to that end. I just feel that search engines still lack the ability to capture the nuance of what it is I do... And these days, it has nothing to do with bigass.jpg or images of drunks passing out.
(Not that those aren't fun things...)
Pesky 32 bit limit (Score:3, Interesting)
If they are stalled at the 32 bit limit and a simple webpage contains just 1.01 images... then they are grinding up against a selection issue. No, its not just money, but as simple algebra shows there would have to be MASSIVE problems selecting which images to update.
Multiply this hypothetical problem with just the distractions created by 'hearding brilliant people' and the plausible distractions of 'satisfying goverment and datamining requests' and pretty soon the stack will be full, pushing the plausible todo list item of '64 bit indexing' down the stack.
Thus.. while, sure, you can simplify this all to 'bandwidth costs money', I put forth that such a simplification is shortsighted. System complexity does not increase in a linear fashion and given that google is 'old enough' to have its systems grow to stress out and magnify whatever shortcomings went into and on top of an originally simple model I bet that slow image search updates are merely a symptom of a much deeper, much simpler than 'money' design hitch which the system that is google.. e.g. the tech/ brains/ people-know-how is a a loss to properly address in a radical way as, with an 'image' to maintain it has become much harder for them to transcend the limits of the 'google-system' and to effectively address the root of the 32 bit problem.
so, yes.. google's number of indexed pages has publically been at the 32 bit limit for a good year.
yes, the hot air and geek dreams projected on the 'google system' have kept anyone from noticing and only now that its impacting the expectations of some folks are people noticing reality. impacted as they are by 'money' they of course project the problem to be solvable by 'money'.
Systemantics dictates that its an inability to maintain self-transcendence which has kept them to keep from having the 32 bit limit catching them with their pants down.
pesky dot 64 dot cl at spamgourmet dot com
High expectations from Google (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://eff.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday December 29 2004, @12:13AM)
I think they know if start playing back room politics people will very quickly move to another search engine. It's a rare thing today to see a big company doing the right thing, and Google is one of them.
No offense, but DUH. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously. It took, what, all of a few hours for the truth to out? But no. You couldn't wait.
Pfft.
Re:No offense, but DUH. (Score:4, Insightful)
Irresponsible? No, it's a Good Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.imagicity.com/)
Some will be quick to decry how slashdot is quick to jump to conclusions. They'll draw fairly pointed comparisons between slashdot and 'real' journalism.
As far as they've reasoned it, they're right. But that's only because they haven't reasoned it quite far enough.
This is exactly the process that happens in the major news media. A journalist spots something unusual, thinks there might be a story there. An investigative team looks into the evidence, tries to get feedback from the source(s), and either corroborates or refines the initial hypothesis.
The difference that we're seeing here is that the story is not landing in our lap, fully formed and packaged according to the publisher's wont. In the past, we never saw the messy part of any story, just the finished product.
I happen to like being able to see the 'messy part' . I like it a lot. In fact, it's why I come to slashdot. If I trusted Big Media to properly digest and format my news, I'd have no need to come here at all.
The truth about slashdot is that, amid all the noise, the silliness, the kvetching and moaning, there is a great deal of solid fact-checking going on. Assumptions do get challenged, news is removed from its 'frame' and picked at. Opinions get challenged or supported by a large number of qualified peers[*].
[*] And admittedly, a smaller but significant number of unqualified peers. 8^)
How many media companies have the same resources available to them? Not many. Most don't even hire fact-checkers any more. And believe it or not, slashdot fact-checkers really are better than none at all. 8^)
Retraction (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not use another search engine? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.mightyware.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 08, @10:18PM)
Abu Ghraib a non-story? (Score:5, Interesting)
With White House counsel Alberto Gonzales--a figure central to the internal discussion of 'when is it not torture' at the White House--on a very short list of Supreme Court nominees, this issue may very well flare up again sooner rather than later.
Re:non-story? (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? I was taught that it was God-Father's (Yahweh's) wish that God-Son (Jesus) were sent to Earth to die by torture. This is depicted by graphical, three-dimensional, images in every Roman-Catholic church and around many Catholic homes and even by images hanging around their necks. And, as you imply, also depicted in Mel Gibson's movie.
Of course, Yahweh didn't order the Romans to torture Jesus, but He could, by His merest wish, enlighten the Roman soldiers on how abhorrent torture is. As many tests demonstrate, intelligence varies a lot between humans, so perhaps, if God were just a little bit more explicit in His teachings, maybe a lot of humans woudn't be so eager to torture each other?...
Re:What?! (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://progsoc.org/~curious/ | Last Journal: Friday April 16 2004, @10:16PM)
I'm not so sure I'm convinced. For one, if this story broke around March/April, how come other March/April news stories have already found their way back into the index? ( Such as this item from 'The Age' [google.com], found with a search for 'John Howard', our PM ). Second, do you honestly think that all the PFC. England photos in the index during this earlier period were all hosted on various news-wires?
I dunno if Google has done anything dodgy here, but it's all bit weird to say the least. I might start using another image searcher that's a bit more up to date.
YLFI