

One man's quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results - morsch
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/algorithms-can-have-errors-one-mans-quest-to-purge-horrific-pictures-from-his-google-results.ars

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crazygringo
I completely sympathize -- this is the first time I've heard of a truly good
rationale for search-result modification.

BUT a slippery slope is a slippery slope, and Google would be opening itself
up to hundreds of thousands of suits if this one succeeded.

HOWEVER, there are still two options open to him:

1) Embark on an aggressive SEO campaign to link his guesthouse/campsite's name
to nice images (though this may be exceedingly difficult)

2) Change the name of his guesthouse/campsite (very annoying, but certainly
feasable)

If I were him, I'd change the name.

~~~
ebiester
I can tell you of a public figure's kid in another country whose camera was
stolen and nude pictures were put up of him in another country. Nobody knows
who did it but the pictures are hosted outside the country on a provider who
doesn't care. They do know that considerable black hat SEO was put into making
this a #1 result for the public figure. (I apologize for being intentionally
vague but this is a source of embarrassment to the family.)

Trolls can be assholes. Google seems to favor the troll.

~~~
magicalist
Many systems do. In the US, people advocating for mandatory sentencing say the
same thing about the justice system, and the RIAA and the MPAA say the same
thing about the DMCA safe harbor and takedown notice provisions.

Outside of getting google to enforce sanctions against whatever "black hat
SEO" methods were used, asking Google to act in that case would appear to be
asking Google to settle on a single notion of the limits of free speech and
defamation when entire countries of people clearly cannot. I'm not sure
putting Google in charge of that is a good idea.

(With this sort of thing you start to see why country-specific censorship
occurs and may be the best of a set of terrible solutions. See also "the right
to forget" vs US court decisions on free speech that is only going to come up
more and more)

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brendano
You can turn his argument around. Why should the needs of a business search be
more important than historical search or journalism search? Maybe, on average,
users more often want to learn about the historical accident than the resort.
Or maybe Bing and Google are providing a better information service by showing
those images.

I'm not sure this is necessarily the case, but the normative standards are
much less clear than is depicted in this article.

~~~
lreeves
That argument would hold a lot more water if searching for "accidente" with
the camp name didn't remove all the pictures of the accident. The pictures of
charred human remains only appear when you search for the name itself.

~~~
mayanksinghal
I am just speculating but may be the choice whether the thumbnails are shown
or not depends on empirical data of now many people have chosen to go to
images.google.com (by clicking "images" link) after making a web search.

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luser001
I'm not sure I'm 100% articulate here, but feel that it's imprecise to call
what Google to doing to produce search results an "algorithm".

quicksort is an algorithm: the input and output are well-specified, and the
algorithm is provably correct.

Google's search engine uses 100's to 1000's of heuristics _created by humans_
to generate the results. Is it really an algorithm? Yes, _pagerank_ is an
algorithm like quicksort.

But the Google search engine uses pagerank as one among the 1000's of
"signals" during result generation. Maybe people think Google uses only
pagerank and that's why they keep saying that Google uses an algorithm.

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azov
Am I the only one who thinks that Google results are actually _relevant_?
Resort's own website does not say a single word about the disaster. Justified
or not, I can imagine lots of campers who would't want to pitch their tent and
spend their vacation at the spot where hundreds of people died a horrible
death. Don't they have a right to know?

Was it even a good idea to renovate that campground? Wouldn't some sort of
memorial make more sense?

~~~
mjwalshe
The cynic in me thinks that the site was cheap to buy because of the tradedgy
- and Hes trying to pull a fast one.

~~~
eCa
Since his family has run the campground since the 1950s that was obviously not
the case.

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matznerd
All that guy needs is to spend his money on some serious Reputation Management
instead of lawyers. For a fraction of the cost he can get other content pushed
ahead of it, no one is building new links to that content, so it is stale.
It's a little harder to do with images but it can still be done with 6 months
to a year of progressive work. On multiple occasions I've buried a story that
was the top result, to the second page. Instead of regular SEO where you bring
one result to the top, this involved bringing 15 other results ahead of it.

~~~
temphn
There are a lot of shady players in SEO. Any recommendations for good ones?

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mathattack
Seems like a very hard fight and a slippery slope. This time it's personal and
seemingly one sided. What happens when it's competing commercial interests
that sue for a change?

~~~
asciident
It seems reasonable that Google's algorithm is listing those photos because
it's finding that a number of people searching for "Camping Alfaques" are
looking for photos of the explosion. So it's just giving those users what they
are looking for.

~~~
CodeMage
That's one thing I never understood about Google: just how does it decide that
something I clicked on was really what I was looking for?

For every person who was looking for photos of the explosion, there are most
likely many more who were looking for general information about "Camping
Alfaques" but clicked on the thumbnails out of arguably morbid interest. I
know I wouldn't resist clicking on that stuff to see what it's about, it seems
to be human nature.

So, in the end, how does Google distinguish people's objectives from their
curiosity?

~~~
jodrellblank
If you see someone on the train reading Twilight, how do you distinguish
between someone who likes Twilight and someone who is taking seriously the
idea "don't judge a book by it's cover" and giving it a fair reading before
deciding?

~~~
Dylan16807
No matter the reason, reading the entire book is a fair endorsement of
prominent twilight placement in the bookstore. It doesn't matter if you hate
it, you wanted to _read_ it. But picking it up, looking at the description in
the back jacket, and putting it back down is most definitely not.

Going to a site for 10 seconds is not an endorsement.

~~~
yew
I believe Google does track "click through - click back" timing, specifically
to limit the impact of this effect. Whether or not it's effective is another
question.

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asdkl234890
Change the name of the resort. Seriously, fastest and easiest way to beat a
computer/algorithm.

~~~
lambda
True, but if they have many years of reputation established, they may not want
to throw that all away because of Google.

~~~
ciupicri
On the other hand if you have a reputation, the search results don't matter
that much. People already know that it's a nice resort and not a disaster.

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paul9290
The owner of the camp needs to take all his energy away from these lawsuits
and focus religiously on SEO and do so on a daily basis!

He needs to create quality sites with tons of images about the camp itself,
the area surrounding and others positive things related to the camp to
purge/eliminate the problem. After he's created these quality sites he needs
to go and do SEO tirelessly everyday until the problem is gone.

It's obvious per Google's in-action re: changing search result for the word,
"jew," that he doesn't need a lawyer but a professional SEO(er).

Now if others in present day (like this Ars article) keep writing and blogging
about the incident then SEO(ing) to the hilt might be a losing battle.

~~~
jsight
I agree. Clicking on the website for the organization in question only reveals
a handful of low-quality, low-resolution pictures.

In general the best way to deal with a "problem" like this is to drown out the
noise with quality content. He should be flooding the web with quality
pictures of what he has, not trying to get Google to change an algorithm.

~~~
paul9290
thanks .. though i wonder why this comment was downvoted?

I'm not saying spam the Internet with junk, but promoting the owner create
quality sites about the topic and others similar topics and then go do SEO.

Google's Panda update notes that quality content will rise to the top. Thus
create quality sites and SEO everyday for months, maybe years to resolve the
issue.

I am sure some entrepreneurial SEOs have reached out to him. Either he pays
them or learns himself. The latter would be best as he's already devoted much
of his life in various ways to solving the issue. THough the article never
notes he's turned to SEO.

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danso
This guy is in a shit situation but when I google "World Trade Center" and
"Oklahoma City", the images of the terror attacks are among the first
thumbnails in the general search.

Yes, of course they were both bigger events, but not so much in relative
terms. This truck explosion led to the deaths of nearly 500 people, in one of
the most gruesome ways possible. His resort is just a small resort...no number
of decades is going to ever obscure such a horrific catastrophe.

That said, why didn't they change the name of the place? I suppose as late as
last decade, Google results were not a big factor for most resorts. But better
late than never, since presumably their brand and reputation won't get much
better.

~~~
Anm
I repeated the same experiment with different results. Searching "World Trade
Center" in either personal or general results show no thumbnail links to the
image search. There was one thumbnail linking to the news search, but it was a
memorial picture. Searching "Oklahoma City" did list the image search
thumbnails. The thumbnails were followed after six entries, if you include the
Google Maps link. Only one of the four was related to the bombing, and that
one picture was a distance shot of the build, not of human remains.

~~~
danso
Hmmm, interesting that my personal results would get that and not you.

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jQueryIsAwesome
Please Google, when we search; avoid all tragedies through history unless we
write the word "tragedy" on the search box... oh! and make sure that no search
result for a business name returns sad search results; is your duty to help us
believe that the whole world is a big happy shopping mall. </rant>

Yep, my blood is boiling...

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Did you read a different article than I did? Did you read the whole article?
Aside from one Nanny Net spokesman, nobody was asking for anything to be
hidden. I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask why "accident camp abc"
doesn't show grisly pictures, but a more generic "camp abc" does show them,
especially when it only started a couple years ago (was somebody hiding that
information for Google's first ten years?).

If it were my business that were being torpedoed by search engine
capriciousness, I'd raise a stink about it, too, it for no other reason than
in hopes it would push the stuff lower in the result stack.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
Clearly this guy is someone trying to rationalize an argument against the fact
that the search results for his business name can produce negative
connotations.

The search engine is not a human being, it haves not capriciousness, and its
not capriciousness from their creators neither; they just created an algorithm
to give you the most relevant results.

~~~
Confusion
This guy has a rational argument: the algorithm does not show the most
relevant results for this search term [1]. Tuning a complex, heuristics-based
algorithm by hand is possible. We also know Google does this for specific
terms [2]. This guy is asking for such tuning for this specific search term.
That's an entirely reasonable request. You may equally reasonably argue that
Google should not grant him this request. If this discussion makes 'your blood
boil', you may need to take some anger management classes. This is not an
issue that should make your blood boil.

[1] Assuming that most people searching for this camping actually want to go
camping, which sounds plausible to me. [2] For instance, the term 'suicide'
was rigged to return results preventing suicide.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
The term suicide is the worst possible example; suicide is not a business, is
a mental issue.

They are not searching for "camping in abc", they are searching for "camp abc"

