Google Wants Everyone to Know…

By: Laurie | February 22nd, 2008

Google would like you to know that, contrary to rumor, they do not censor images for political content. Even explosive little hot potatoes like this one of Egyptian player Mohamed Aboutreika at the African Cup of Nations.

From the blog from a Google software engineer.

Every now and then a story surfaces that Google has ‘censored’ images or web pages and removed them from our site without saying a word to anyone. For example, we noticed some sites in the Middle East and beyond are asking about Egyptian striker Mohammad Aboutrika’s goal celebration during Egypt’s African Cup of Nations match against Sudan. After scoring the 3rd goal, Aboutrika revealed a t-shirt with the message ‘Sympathize with Gaza’.

Well 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 its 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.

No-one from any government has contacted us about this image, and we have no reason to remove it.

In other words, they’re not censoring. They’re just stale.

Based on my experience with Google Images, this sounds accurate. They rarely have the most recent, news-y images in their database. To me this seems like much conspiracy theory about nothing. And that’s a good thing. First you start censoring politically hot photos, and the next thing you know we won’t be able to post pics of Beckham with his hand down his shorts.

When that happens, we’re all losers.

(On a marginally relevant note, the reason Google and I spell Aboutreika’s name differently is that written Arabic is sound-based, not alphabetic. This means that any number of spellings are possible for the same name. I’m going with Aboutreika, the spelling I got used to when I was blogging on the African Cup of Nations, but obviously Google’s Aboutrika is correct as well. Yes, this does make web searches interesting and sometimes less productive than they could be.)