If you searched for Michelle Obama in Google Images earlier today, you may have been disturbed by the first result, an extremely racist and offensive picture of the First Lady photoshopped to resemble a monkey. Google had removed the image after it had first appeared at the top of results last week, because the host webpage was infected with malware. However, the photo has since been published by other websites that are virus-free and comply with Google’s rules, so this time, there is really nothing that Google can do. The company is using their ad space to explain that, as a search engine, Google’s only function is to reflect content that is available online, and a site’s ranking is based on complex algorithms that use an abundance of factors, including how people are linking to content across the Web, the words surrounding an image, and words in a file name, to determine the best result to a given query. Perhaps this situation will cause Google administrators to question if this recipe for providing relevant results should be reviewed.

It appears the high ranking is a the result of tech prank and calls to mind a similar mishap that occurred when George W. Bush was in office, in which a picture of the President was a top result when one Googled “miserable failure.” These antics, coined “Google bombs,” are organized efforts to change search results by linking repeatedly to a web page or image with certain key terms, as we discussed regarding links of Wikipedia which now carry a “do not follow” tag to reduce spamming on the encyclopedia and ensure such links are not artificially  inflated in popularity.

Google has apologized (sort of) for this upsetting experience, but is an apology really necessary? Should Google even consider requests to censor results? Google is probably asked to remove offensive search results or at least drop them in ranking all the time but to actually do so would severely compromise its reputation of neutrality and the integrity of its search results. A company seeking to create the world’s largest library cannot engage in censorship. Moreover, the impartial availability of such an image allows Americans to have important and necessary conversations about current political and racial relations in our country, reflecting opinions and controversies that are more contemporary than anything that can be found in other forms of mass media, even periodicals.

Another, and perhaps more important, good that can come of this situation is news coverage of the image actually highlights the way Google works, a topic of which most people remain clueless despite their heavy dependance on the search engine in their everyday lives. We have to remember that Google is created by humans and is far from perfect, and perhaps further actions need to be taken to make it more difficult for users to bomb especially if Google is to maintain its monopolistic control over the search engine industry.

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