Google: Glitch Not Racism

Despite Google's technical explanation, there's a twist to the Parsons-primate episode that could lead online users to suspect hacker involvement. Over the weekend, the company appeared to have corrected the mismatch, at least temporarily. At times, the primates photo was substituted with a photo of a formally attired Parsons posing with an actor in a Bugs Bunny costume. (The character is owned by Time Warner, which declined to comment for this story.) Later, however, the rhesus photo reappeared, supplanting Parsons and Bugs Bunny. Google denies it was hacked and insists the incident was again, simply a result of its computer systems.

This isn't the first time automation has managed to offend. In January 2006, as USA Today reported at the time, a feature on Wal-Mart's Web site that generated recommended purchases linked a "Planet of the Apes" DVD to films about African-Americans, including Martin Luther King Jr., Tina Turner and boxer Jack Johnson. The retail giant, citing errant automation, apologized to any offended customers and shut down the recommendation system.

Given the sheer size of what Google does, the chances of getting everything right all the time would appear to be statistically nil. In September, the latest data available, Google handled 38.2 billion searches--some 63 percent of the total 61 billion searches worldwide, says Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst with Internet measuring service Comscore. Of Google's total, Google News accounted for some 103 million searches. According to Google, it "crawls" 4,500 English-language news sites, and thousands more worldwide in other languages, to seize freshly posted stories and images for storage in Google's servers that it taps to respond to keyword searches.

Google won't disclose the scope or details of its mismatching problem. But the problem clearly seems to be associated with material from at least one of the world's major originators of news--Reuters, which declined to comment on the situation. The primates and associated Parsons and O'Neal stories, for example, were both retrieved by Google from Reuters--as were the mismatched wildfire photo and Argentine election story, as well as other examples.

Reuters makes its stories and photos available separately for retrieval by search engines, Google foremost. When the search giant dispatches a crawler to snare a story from the Reuters site, it simultaneously deploys a crawler to Reuters's photo gallery. But the image crawler isn't discriminating. It simply grabs the first photo in the gallery, never mind that the particular image often has nothing remotely to do with the text-based story.

Google says it is trying hard to fix the problem. But for now, it seems a primate could do a better job.

© 2007