Google Embarrassed By Nasty Michelle Obama Image

How many Americans harbor unpleasant thoughts about Michelle Obama? Google (GOOG) just gave us a pretty good idea.

On Nov. 13, someone at the Search Engine Roundtable noticed that when you search for images of the first lady on Google, the No. 1-ranked image that appears is that of lovely Michelle with a monkey's face. (Click here if you really must see it, but it's quite nasty.) Since Google's algorithms assess in part how popular or linked-to an image is, the popularity of Obama's simian visage means one of two things: Someone or some group is manipulating the links to advance the image in the rankings (a process known as Google bombing or search engine optimization), or the image really is that popular, which we don't like to think about.

Apparently, neither does Google, which removed all links to the image almost as soon as the rest of the world noticed. But as Search Engine Land writer Matt McGee noticed, the image didn't violated any of Google's guidelines, so removing the image appeared to be a violation of the company's policies. Fortunately, the page that promoted the Obama-as-ape meme turns out to have been a malware platform, infecting the computers of people who visit it. So there's that.

Except, as the San Francisco Chronicle points out, the Obama image has gotten back into the Internet and is rising in the image ranks once again. Google's engineers are so upset about this that they've bought expensive ad space on their own site, offering a link to an explanation and apology. Sometimes people are just plain shitty, the "Google Team" declared, and Google is a reflection of the online universe those folks collectively create. "Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. ... We apologize if you've had an upsetting experience using Google. We hope you understand our position."