January 2, 2005

5:49 PM

Not to cry "conspiracy" or nothin', but is there a reason that Google image searches for Fahrenheit 9/11 and Team America yield almost no relevant results? I thought maybe it was just a copyright thing, but there seems to be no problem with other movie titles.
posted by Robot Johnny to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Yahoo's image search has no problems. Same with Lycos. So what gives?
posted by Robot Johnny at 5:58 PM on January 2, 2005

A few non-conspiratorial theories:

"Fahrenheit 9/11": First off, no-one really wants to look at Michael Moore that much, so the lack of visual content is understandable. Second, several searches may be needed due to people who can't spell Fahrenheit and alternate punctuations of 9/11 (i.e. 9-11)

The Team America results seem primarily to be skewed by too many irrelevant results, which makes some sense.
posted by dagnyscott at 6:01 PM on January 2, 2005

Google's image search isn't updated very often (every 6 months?), much to their embarassment late last year. There was a Metafilter thread about this as well.
posted by John Shaft at 6:02 PM on January 2, 2005

Farenheit 911 works
posted by mert at 6:12 PM on January 2, 2005

Sergey Brin said this in a second-hand Slashdot comment (Chris DiBona, the poster has ties to Google and Slashdot) when the missing Abu Ghraib photos came up:

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.

In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for abu graib photos to get plenty of what you are looking for

posted by revgeorge at 6:15 PM on January 2, 2005

dagnyscott, I tried various spellings. And various combinations (with and without the "World Police" subtitle, fr'instance).

I'm just searching for images for a year-end movie list on my own blog, and found it odd that the only two movies that had no results were these two politically-charged flicks.
posted by Robot Johnny at 6:22 PM on January 2, 2005

I know this is heresy and all, but could it be that Google's image search just isn't that good?
posted by alan at 6:31 PM on January 2, 2005

Farenheit 911 works

On Google image search? That only gives me about ten results (with or without quotes), as opposed to hundreds for Anchorman.
posted by mr_roboto at 6:37 PM on January 2, 2005

My friend who works at Google told me that they haven't updated their image index because they are working on a system for filtering out malicious jpegs that exploit vulnerabilities in IE and Windows. He promises that it's coming soon.
posted by agropyron at 6:44 PM on January 2, 2005

I'm just searching for images for a year-end movie list on my own blog

A little off the question, but wouldn't the photosite listings on IMDb be the best place to look for pictures like that?
posted by flashboy at 8:17 PM on January 2, 2005

Why would Anchorman give more results, if presumably the problem is that it hasn't updated yet? I believe it's more recent than F9/11. I just tested Yahoo and Altavista, and they give almost identical results (many pages of images). Frankly, I'm finding Google's explanation highly suspect.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:28 PM on January 2, 2005

...wouldn't the photosite listings on IMDb be the best place to look...

Ultimately yes, but I was hoping to save time by not visiting too many pages/sites.

I believe it's more recent than F9/11. ... Frankly, I'm finding Google's explanation highly suspect.

That's how I feel. Something's screwy.
posted by Robot Johnny at 8:54 PM on January 2, 2005

Well, since google's explanation of not staying current is for something completely different (and earlier), I'd suspect they're working extra-hard to keep current, and Anchorman came out on video/DVD recently, so there are plenty of recent spiders at video rental and retail sites.
posted by dagnyscott at 8:07 AM on January 3, 2005