Insight into Google Image Search
July 22, 2018
I read “This Is What Happens When You Google the Word “Idiot.” The insight pivots on a query sent to Google Images for the word “idiot.” The results presented images of the US president. The same query fed to Bing generates a set of results without the image of Donald Trump. Here’s the explanation about the “why” of these results:
Google states that “[image search] analyzes the text on the page adjacent to the image, the image caption and dozens of other factors to determine the image content.” Added to that, Google uses sophisticated algorithms to remove duplicate images and ensure that the best quality images are presented first in your results. What this means is that whoever writes an article determines (mostly, there are other factors too) whether an image appears in Google Image Search results or not. This partly depends on the keywords they use adjacent or in the caption of the image, not necessarily the “content” of the image. Also, Google indexes the images on a website the same way it indexes web pages, by crawling across the Internet periodically. A quick investigation of the pages in the search results for the word “idiot” proves this to be true. In each of the links where Donald Trump’s image appears, the word “idiot” appears as a keyword and in most cases close to his image or sometimes in the caption.
Seems simple enough. Word plus image equals relevance.
Stephen E Arnold, July 21, 2018
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