One man's quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results | Hacker News Reader

One man's quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results

arstechnica.com

87 pointsmorsch43 comments

I completely sympathize -- this is the first time I've heard of a truly good rationale for search-result modification.

BUT a slippery slope is a slippery slope, and Google would be opening itself up to hundreds of thousands of suits if this one succeeded.

HOWEVER, there are still two options open to him:

1) Embark on an aggressive SEO campaign to link his guesthouse/campsite's name to nice images (though this may be exceedingly difficult)

2) Change the name of his guesthouse/campsite (very annoying, but certainly feasable)

If I were him, I'd change the name.

Undesrscores how powerful Google is. To many people internet is what Google shows to them. Though its a slippery slope, If the peson who is requesting for changes is liable for those then Google should comply. DMCA also has similar provision.

Of course, in practice no one is responsible for misuse of the DMCA. Google would have a better incentive to control misuse of any "correction" feature, but it would still probably end up being used to censor things occasionally.

It's a difficult problem to solve both because of Google's primary goal (provide an accurate representation of what people are looking for) and the difficulty of deciding who's actually "responsible" for a given category of content.

I can tell you of a public figure's kid in another country whose camera was stolen and nude pictures were put up of him in another country. Nobody knows who did it but the pictures are hosted outside the country on a provider who doesn't care. They do know that considerable black hat SEO was put into making this a #1 result for the public figure. (I apologize for being intentionally vague but this is a source of embarrassment to the family.)

Trolls can be assholes. Google seems to favor the troll.

Many systems do. In the US, people advocating for mandatory sentencing say the same thing about the justice system, and the RIAA and the MPAA say the same thing about the DMCA safe harbor and takedown notice provisions.

Outside of getting google to enforce sanctions against whatever "black hat SEO" methods were used, asking Google to act in that case would appear to be asking Google to settle on a single notion of the limits of free speech and defamation when entire countries of people clearly cannot. I'm not sure putting Google in charge of that is a good idea.

(With this sort of thing you start to see why country-specific censorship occurs and may be the best of a set of terrible solutions. See also "the right to forget" vs US court decisions on free speech that is only going to come up more and more)

You should propose a workable solution before making statements like "Google seems to favor the troll". How would you solve this problem given that manually removing the results are probably out the question for legal reasons?

You can turn his argument around. Why should the needs of a business search be more important than historical search or journalism search? Maybe, on average, users more often want to learn about the historical accident than the resort. Or maybe Bing and Google are providing a better information service by showing those images.

I'm not sure this is necessarily the case, but the normative standards are much less clear than is depicted in this article.

That argument would hold a lot more water if searching for "accidente" with the camp name didn't remove all the pictures of the accident. The pictures of charred human remains only appear when you search for the name itself.

I am just speculating but may be the choice whether the thumbnails are shown or not depends on empirical data of now many people have chosen to go to images.google.com (by clicking "images" link) after making a web search.

I'm not sure I'm 100% articulate here, but feel that it's imprecise to call what Google to doing to produce search results an "algorithm".

quicksort is an algorithm: the input and output are well-specified, and the algorithm is provably correct.

Google's search engine uses 100's to 1000's of heuristics created by humans to generate the results. Is it really an algorithm? Yes, pagerank is an algorithm like quicksort.

But the Google search engine uses pagerank as one among the 1000's of "signals" during result generation. Maybe people think Google uses only pagerank and that's why they keep saying that Google uses an algorithm.

This guy is in a shit situation but when I google "World Trade Center" and "Oklahoma City", the images of the terror attacks are among the first thumbnails in the general search.

Yes, of course they were both bigger events, but not so much in relative terms. This truck explosion led to the deaths of nearly 500 people, in one of the most gruesome ways possible. His resort is just a small resort...no number of decades is going to ever obscure such a horrific catastrophe.

That said, why didn't they change the name of the place? I suppose as late as last decade, Google results were not a big factor for most resorts. But better late than never, since presumably their brand and reputation won't get much better.

I repeated the same experiment with different results. Searching "World Trade Center" in either personal or general results show no thumbnail links to the image search. There was one thumbnail linking to the news search, but it was a memorial picture. Searching "Oklahoma City" did list the image search thumbnails. The thumbnails were followed after six entries, if you include the Google Maps link. Only one of the four was related to the bombing, and that one picture was a distance shot of the build, not of human remains.

Hmmm, interesting that my personal results would get that and not you.

Am I the only one who thinks that Google results are actually relevant? Resort's own website does not say a single word about the disaster. Justified or not, I can imagine lots of campers who would't want to pitch their tent and spend their vacation at the spot where hundreds of people died a horrible death. Don't they have a right to know?

Was it even a good idea to renovate that campground? Wouldn't some sort of memorial make more sense?

The cynic in me thinks that the site was cheap to buy because of the tradedgy - and Hes trying to pull a fast one.

Since his family has run the campground since the 1950s that was obviously not the case.

All that guy needs is to spend his money on some serious Reputation Management instead of lawyers. For a fraction of the cost he can get other content pushed ahead of it, no one is building new links to that content, so it is stale. It's a little harder to do with images but it can still be done with 6 months to a year of progressive work. On multiple occasions I've buried a story that was the top result, to the second page. Instead of regular SEO where you bring one result to the top, this involved bringing 15 other results ahead of it.

There are a lot of shady players in SEO. Any recommendations for good ones?

Seems like a very hard fight and a slippery slope. This time it's personal and seemingly one sided. What happens when it's competing commercial interests that sue for a change?

It seems reasonable that Google's algorithm is listing those photos because it's finding that a number of people searching for "Camping Alfaques" are looking for photos of the explosion. So it's just giving those users what they are looking for.

That's one thing I never understood about Google: just how does it decide that something I clicked on was really what I was looking for?

For every person who was looking for photos of the explosion, there are most likely many more who were looking for general information about "Camping Alfaques" but clicked on the thumbnails out of arguably morbid interest. I know I wouldn't resist clicking on that stuff to see what it's about, it seems to be human nature.

So, in the end, how does Google distinguish people's objectives from their curiosity?

If you see someone on the train reading Twilight, how do you distinguish between someone who likes Twilight and someone who is taking seriously the idea "don't judge a book by it's cover" and giving it a fair reading before deciding?

I don't know whether your comment supposed to restate my question or answer it. If it's the latter, the difference is not that I'm not the one offering a service that classifies books by popularity based entirely on what I see people reading on trains. My question still stands.

No matter the reason, reading the entire book is a fair endorsement of prominent twilight placement in the bookstore. It doesn't matter if you hate it, you wanted to read it. But picking it up, looking at the description in the back jacket, and putting it back down is most definitely not.

Going to a site for 10 seconds is not an endorsement.

I believe Google does track "click through - click back" timing, specifically to limit the impact of this effect. Whether or not it's effective is another question.

It determines that partly based on whether you hit the back button or not. They would like for you to never hit Back

Well, there's the echo chamber effect. You search for something previously unknown to you, you click on something that catches your eye, thereby suggesting it for the next person.

Rinse, repeat.

That could be, but it could also be biased. For example, people looking for the camping site for a vacation might see those pictures and then click on then, not because they were looking for those pictures, but because OMG what is that in those pictures?! As a result, though, it would appear that people are searching for the pictures in the first place.

I'm sure it's much more complicated than that. But we can't tell if the pictures are shown for good reason or not.

Or for example an oil company that wanted to remove images from searches like "piper alpha" or "Bophal" I am sure Dow would love to have those images removed.

Change the name of the resort. Seriously, fastest and easiest way to beat a computer/algorithm.

True, but if they have many years of reputation established, they may not want to throw that all away because of Google.

On the other hand if you have a reputation, the search results don't matter that much. People already know that it's a nice resort and not a disaster.

The search results strongly suggest that they have a reputation as the site of a disaster.

Or, I do not know how popular gore/ghost are over there, change the theme. Take your marketing in an entirely different direction. This of course could backfire.

The owner of the camp needs to take all his energy away from these lawsuits and focus religiously on SEO and do so on a daily basis!

He needs to create quality sites with tons of images about the camp itself, the area surrounding and others positive things related to the camp to purge/eliminate the problem. After he's created these quality sites he needs to go and do SEO tirelessly everyday until the problem is gone.

It's obvious per Google's in-action re: changing search result for the word, "jew," that he doesn't need a lawyer but a professional SEO(er).

Now if others in present day (like this Ars article) keep writing and blogging about the incident then SEO(ing) to the hilt might be a losing battle.

I agree. Clicking on the website for the organization in question only reveals a handful of low-quality, low-resolution pictures.

In general the best way to deal with a "problem" like this is to drown out the noise with quality content. He should be flooding the web with quality pictures of what he has, not trying to get Google to change an algorithm.

thanks .. though i wonder why this comment was downvoted?

I'm not saying spam the Internet with junk, but promoting the owner create quality sites about the topic and others similar topics and then go do SEO.

Google's Panda update notes that quality content will rise to the top. Thus create quality sites and SEO everyday for months, maybe years to resolve the issue.

I am sure some entrepreneurial SEOs have reached out to him. Either he pays them or learns himself. The latter would be best as he's already devoted much of his life in various ways to solving the issue. THough the article never notes he's turned to SEO.

Please Google, when we search; avoid all tragedies through history unless we write the word "tragedy" on the search box... oh! and make sure that no search result for a business name returns sad search results; is your duty to help us believe that the whole world is a big happy shopping mall. </rant>

Yep, my blood is boiling...

Did you read a different article than I did? Did you read the whole article? Aside from one Nanny Net spokesman, nobody was asking for anything to be hidden. I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask why "accident camp abc" doesn't show grisly pictures, but a more generic "camp abc" does show them, especially when it only started a couple years ago (was somebody hiding that information for Google's first ten years?).

If it were my business that were being torpedoed by search engine capriciousness, I'd raise a stink about it, too, it for no other reason than in hopes it would push the stuff lower in the result stack.

I should follow this up with this: as much as this sucks, and as much as I understand the guy's complaint and don't fault him at all, I don't see how Google can make a special case for him. However, google could look at the general pattern and ask "should we be putting pictures of tragedies up on the first page of results that aren't asking specifically about the tragedy?" That becomes a general algorithm question and not a specific search question.

I don't know enough about Google's internals to know if that kind of semantic information is available, but I trust if anybody could accomplish it, it's them.

I know if I was a parent of a victim of something like Columbine, I wouldn't want pictures of bodies showing up as the first thing 10 years later.

Clearly this guy is someone trying to rationalize an argument against the fact that the search results for his business name can produce negative connotations.

The search engine is not a human being, it haves not capriciousness, and its not capriciousness from their creators neither; they just created an algorithm to give you the most relevant results.

This guy has a rational argument: the algorithm does not show the most relevant results for this search term [1]. Tuning a complex, heuristics-based algorithm by hand is possible. We also know Google does this for specific terms [2]. This guy is asking for such tuning for this specific search term. That's an entirely reasonable request. You may equally reasonably argue that Google should not grant him this request. If this discussion makes 'your blood boil', you may need to take some anger management classes. This is not an issue that should make your blood boil.

[1] Assuming that most people searching for this camping actually want to go camping, which sounds plausible to me. [2] For instance, the term 'suicide' was rigged to return results preventing suicide.

The term suicide is the worst possible example; suicide is not a business, is a mental issue.

They are not searching for "camping in abc", they are searching for "camp abc"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com