Google's Soft Censorship of Images

(click on picture for larger image)

This morning, I saw something completely new from Google -- soft censorship on their image search.  I read on CNN, the story of Derek Medina, or how he killed his wife, and posted the picture of her body on Facebook, before turning himself in to police.  The article said that the picture went viral.

To see how viral, I did an image search.  I was amazed that Google initiated soft censorship on the images.  The censored images just had a gray icon.  When you clicked on them, you could see the preview of the image, but I was amazed that they would do this.

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense for the sake of propriety, because you still can see the image if you take the trouble to click on it and open a preview layer, but it was still surprising.  It reminded me of the magazine racks in the convenience stores that have cardboard over the covers of the girlie magazines.

The jury is out as to whether I like this or not.

Google Image Search With Image Test

This article deals with testing Google new image search using an image.


Google has a new feature in their image search where you can drag and drop an image and it will find like images. I decided to test it with an "average" image of an underwater shot of a brightly colored little fish as pictured above.

I dropped the image onto the search bar and waited a few seconds for it to upload. Then I got the following result.

Google thinks that the images are similar. Obviously it didn't recognize the fish or the coral reef or the fact that it was an underwater picture. Some of the results returned were of a flower, art, desserts and multi-colored mosaic things.

Obviously it picked up yellow as the primary search term and hoped that what it produced was also yellow. This somehow reminds me of a dumb blonde on a multiple choice test.

I decided to try it with something else. I downloaded a picture of Albert Einstein.

I then renamed it to something silly so that the name of the pic wouldn't give any clues. Google knew that it was Albert Einstein right away. They probably developed the algorithm using famous people and Einstein is one of them.

Then I change the image by altering the horizontal to vertical ratio, and used the eraser tool to erase the background. I used a Gimp filter to render lava designs.

In the web portion,it said best guess was Albert Einstein, so it was pretty good. Here is the visual results.

Winston Churchill is numbered among the results as well as Superman and George Bush. George Bush ain't no Einstein. However, Einstein does show up in the results.

The tool is getting there, but not quite there yet.

I was thinking of uploading my own pic to see what the results would be, but I am afraid that Google would keep it forever and use it as a test case. Even though there motto is "Do no evil", I still don't trust them with all of my information.