There Are No Pictures of iPhone 4 on Google Image Search | Hacker News Reader

There Are No Pictures of iPhone 4 on Google Image Search

google.com

60 pointscloudwalking26 comments

Google Image search is unfortunately not real-time. This is not the first time someone has noticed. Google was accused of censoring the Abu-Ghraib images, because several weeks after the event, the photos could not be found on Google Images. Google replied:

In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=10747654&sid=128...

Then they were accused of censoring a picture of Egyptian striker Mohammad Aboutrika's goal celebration where he revealed a T-shirt with the message "Sympathize with Gaza". Matt Cutts had to write a blog entry debunking this claim.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/debunking-a-misconception-plus...

I'm happy to accept this as the correct explanation, and I'm in no hurry to assign petty motives to Google over this, but in your last link, Matt Cutts says "it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot." And by "a few days," he appears to literally mean less than a week.

But it's been almost a full month since the WWDC keynote, and nearly two weeks since customers have been posting a barrage of iPhone 4 pictures to the web. So I'm doubtful that Google Images' delayed refresh rate is a sufficient explanation.

Edit: In response to your reply below, you might be right. I've only tried a few searches, but images of major events from the past month seem hard to come by. A search for 'Galaxy S' does give some results from within the past month (the first result was from June 23), as does a search for 'Kindle graphite' (July 2), but presumably refreshes aren't comprehensive. Still, a month-long refresh rate is really surprising. If you need to find images from a recent event, Google Image search may be practically useless.

I can't find any pictures of the World Cup matches, despite it having started on June 11. All I see is stock photography. In fact, I can't find pictures of any event that has occurred in the past month.

Seems like the index is in fact out of date and Matt Cutts is overestimating the indexing speed of Google Images. In the case of the Abu Ghraib photos, it took around 1 month for the images to appear.

There are tons of iPhone 4 pictures, such as the gizmodo picture re-leaked onto thenextweb, etc.:

http://www.google.com/images?q=iphone+4&hl=en&safe=o...

The more popular results reflect a linking pattern that's from then (mostly linking to the curved Macbook Air style fake iPhone 4), rather than now (linking to the released phone).

Ah right, sounddust's comment framed me into thinking there were no pictures of the iPhone 4 (searchable with the terms 'iPhone 4'), despite previous commenters pointing out they appear after several pages of results. Sorry about that.

But it does mean sounddust's explanation is incorrect, since this isn't a matter of whether 'iPhone 4'-searchable post-WWDC images are indexed. The question is why the images are buried beneath several pages of results.

I know this may sound crazy, but ever thought of using Bing? Web experience is pretty good too: http://www.bing.com/search?q=iphone+4

I have an irrational objection - every time I go there I think of Needle Nose Ned from the movie Groundhog Day. Bing!

It is quite cool. A very good friend of mine just landed a job with the Bing team. He is super excited about the work they are doing.

Not to be a total pedant here, but word of mouth from a friend whose livelihood depends on Bing is not a great indicator of how great Bing is.

Why? Their image search isn't any better:

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=iphone+4&FORM=BIFD

Actually it is. I found an iphone 4 image:

http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/iphone4-giz.jpg

Compared to the google search which got none.

Normally i nod knowingly and say, "No one appreciates how hard image search really is." But in this case, both Bing and Yahoo do much better. Usually Bing image search is better than google image search, but not by this much.

iPad images are similarly scarce. I wonder what's up? Could google really be this ham-fisted? I find it hard to believe, given that textual searches are not similarly obscured.

There are some: http://www.google.com/images?q=%2B%22iphone+4%22&hl=en&#...

Perhaps the "4" confuses Google.

This seems very strange to me. There are no Apple PR pictures or pictures taken by normal folks. On the second page of results there's a picture of a picture of the phone (at the keynote), but it's not until page six that there's actually a picture of the thing. And it's the stolen Gizmodo one at that.

Am I the only one that finds this really weird?

(Here's a screenshot, as I imagine this will change at some point: http://cloudwalking.posterous.com/where-are-all-the-iphone-4...)

Maybe in retaliation at Apple, Google applied their porn-filtering AI prowess to remove iPhone 4 off the face of Google Image Search?

</conspiracy>

(They start to appear after page 5 btw).

Or when you search for 'iphone4'

Maybe an effect of SEO madness and the enormous hype surrounding everything iPhone?

Google's image search is a very different beast to their text search. It isn't continually updated in the same way, instead they seem to do an update every month or so. It's 1 month since wwdc when images of iphone 4 appeared, so it's possible that they just haven't done an update in that time.

IIRC image search updated way less frequently than search itself. If that is still true it may explain why there are "prototype" and "concept" images but not release images.

Odd. There are on Yahoo image search:

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A9G_bDiWzT...

Pretty interesting.. but there are a few results for "iphone four". http://www.google.co.uk/images?&q=iphone+four. In the UK version the first image result is the iphone 4.

At least it seems to me that Droid X has similar problems:

http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=droid%20x&gbv=2...

Put the word Apple in front iPhone 4 and iPad. This will help your search.

There are no iPad images either.

They start at the end of the first page.

ipad images are "blocked" (or at least they were when it was released) and it seems like they're doing the same with the iphone. Well, apple won't allow google ads in their apps anymore...

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