November 20, 2007

The Irony Behind an Image Search Result

Google's image search engine has always returned many strange results, but universal search made this problem more visible. For some queries, Google shows three images at the top (or at the bottom) of the main search results pages. One of these queries is [RSS icon], which should obviously return the orange icon for feeds. But it also returns something else...


The irony is that the inappropriate picture was included in a post from 2005 that criticized Google's image search engine. Here's the full post [contains a bigger version of the image]:
I wanted to add an RSS icon to my blog, so I turned to the trusty Google images search: RSS. And what do I get. Certainly not the little orange RSS box (though if this really was the RSS icon, maybe people other than serious geeks would use the technology).

This goes to show that Google image search hasn't improved so much since then. Just because a page contains "RSS icon" twice in the neighborhood of an image doesn't mean the image shows an RSS icon.

{ via Digg }

16 comments:

  1. I guess this, your own blog post also referencing the image and the page with the title "RSS icon" in the neighbourhood, is only going to make matters worse...!

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  2. Well, I'm going to keep checking until they fix it!

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  3. this is too hysterical - i just did a search for "rss icon" LAST NIGHT and saw that pic. made no sense, but gave me a good chuckle.

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  4. As Bob said, your post and cross links will reinforce it. Perhaps it will catch on :D

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  5. Please search Dumb ;)

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  6. Can't Google via some image recognition algo figure out there's too much skin showing in that image, rendering it NSFW?

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  7. I don't think they do semantic analysis. And what's not-safe-for-work in this photo? According to Wikipedia, "the NSFW tag is used on interactive discussion areas (...) to mark URLs or hyperlinks that may be sexually explicit or includes audio that contains profanity, so that the reader can avoid content that may be objectionable." There's nothing sexually explicit about that photo.

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  8. > I don't think they do
    > semantic analysis.

    "Q: What approaches do you use to make your results safe? A: Google Image Team member: We have created advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs, *and the image itself*." (source).
    Not to say that this is true, or that it falls in the scope of what you call "semantic" analysis. But you can't rule it out completely.

    > And what's not-safe-for-work
    > in this photo?

    Actually, a woman posing in swimswear *can* be NSFW depending on your male/ female boss. Especially because it might look to someone casually glancing over your shoulder *as if* you'd have searched for something adult related at work.

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  9. Google images has steadily been becoming more unreliable due to the majority of sites on the internet being dynamically generated.

    They introduced their Image Labeler to help update the indexes with relevant tags but it obviously isn't getting the detail Google had hoped to retrieve from the users.

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  10. I don't think Google uses the data from Image Labeler (at least not in the live version). In this case, the tags would've been pretty useful.

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  11. What do I think? I think they should change the RSS Icon ;)

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  12. http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=rss+icon gives me better results

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  13. I think we have made it much too popular now. It is showing up with
    comments from this blog post:)

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  14. if it's come to be that a woman in a bikini is nsfw, this civilization is flushed.

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  15. For what it is worth, she no longer appears in the basic search results, and in the image results she's dropped to fourth place.

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  16. Whenever you see two image results instead of three at the top of a search results page, one of the results has been manually removed.

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