There's some interesting discussion over at Metafilter -- it seems Google Image Search doesn't return any of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and people are wondering whether there's an underlying agenda. I don't know anything about how Google's image search technology works, but if the model is anything like their web search model, then links and associations (with words on the elevant page) should be the most important inputs, and I remember a hell of a lot of blogs linking to and talking about those photos a few months ago. Also, recent photos news should have a higher search priority than older ones.
I guess it's possible that Image Search ignores this last qualifier because users are looking more canonical pictures (they're making power point presentations or something). But Google says explicitly that recent news photos may appear first in the results. And while there's some evidence that the webcrawler for this service only updates every six months, its bizarre that they wouldn't piggyback the Google News results (which are minute-to-minute and often include photos), especially when they say they will. And of course, it's already been more than six months since the first photos went public.
So anyway, I'll be happy to entertain more speculation about how Google Image Search is such dated technology that it won't return the most talked about and controversial pictures of the year. But I also think it's worth considering the possibility that there's something else going on here.
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