Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Nov. 25th, 2009 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matthewdalyTwo stories about Michelle Obama in the news today. Two!
As rivka points out, the AP ran a story about the dress the First Lady wore at the state dinner that the reporter described as "flesh-colored", and runs a picture next to it that makes it very very clear that it is not the color of flesh at all. Sheesh, it's been almost fifty years since Crayola picked up the clue phone on this one, so what the hell is going on at the AP editor's desk? Frankly, it seems to me that even a healthy white person oughtn't have flesh of that particular shade.
And I refuse to look, but according to the news, if you did a Google image search of Michelle Obama this morning, the top result would have been a crudely altered picture that portrays her as a monkey. Again, you can't make me look. Google initially resisted calls to fix this problem, saying 'We have, in general, a bias toward free speech', and the only reason the problem was remedied from what I can gather is that the original blog took down the image (which isn't too surprising if, in fact, it was viewed and linked by enough people in the world to get it to the top of Google's scoring algorithm).
I like free speech too, but that isn't what this is about. If someone does an image search for Michelle Obama, and Google's top scored image is not a picture of Michelle Obama, then there is something wrong with Google's scoring algorithm, and pretending that you are not responsible for the relevance of your search results is highly disingenuous. By all means, keep a link to the picture and tag it so that it does very well if someone searches for "Michelle Obama racist monkey infantile". But you've managed the web search so that the entire top page of Obama's search is filled with non-pranks, and the rest of your searches need to catch up.
As rivka points out, the AP ran a story about the dress the First Lady wore at the state dinner that the reporter described as "flesh-colored", and runs a picture next to it that makes it very very clear that it is not the color of flesh at all. Sheesh, it's been almost fifty years since Crayola picked up the clue phone on this one, so what the hell is going on at the AP editor's desk? Frankly, it seems to me that even a healthy white person oughtn't have flesh of that particular shade.
And I refuse to look, but according to the news, if you did a Google image search of Michelle Obama this morning, the top result would have been a crudely altered picture that portrays her as a monkey. Again, you can't make me look. Google initially resisted calls to fix this problem, saying 'We have, in general, a bias toward free speech', and the only reason the problem was remedied from what I can gather is that the original blog took down the image (which isn't too surprising if, in fact, it was viewed and linked by enough people in the world to get it to the top of Google's scoring algorithm).
I like free speech too, but that isn't what this is about. If someone does an image search for Michelle Obama, and Google's top scored image is not a picture of Michelle Obama, then there is something wrong with Google's scoring algorithm, and pretending that you are not responsible for the relevance of your search results is highly disingenuous. By all means, keep a link to the picture and tag it so that it does very well if someone searches for "Michelle Obama racist monkey infantile". But you've managed the web search so that the entire top page of Obama's search is filled with non-pranks, and the rest of your searches need to catch up.
