Is Google Censoring Looting Photos?

In the media's defense, the black man in the picture is carrying alot of things, much more than the two in the other picture.

Ray
Yeah, but as I said on another thread, there is no gray area in the eyes of the law. At least not officially. Taking one loaf of bread or one package of diapers is still looting, technically.

I do see the point being made though. If I were a LEO in the city, I would not be arresting looters who were taking food. The stuff is gonna spoil anyway.

I would be shooting at folks carrying TVs and computers though. It's stupid what they're doing, and criminal.

Maybe just shoot to wound, and let the parasites/bacteria finish them off.

Why won't Google cough up pics of looters?

Give it a few days they will have tons of pictures I am sure.

The reason you cannot find pictures using words at this time is because most if not the all have been taken by the media and they unlike us, use numbers to identify their pictures.

I just typed looting and got lots of pics but none from the past two days and all of them were named looting the photos I mean, i.e., looting_bagdad.

I just want to say one thing about the looting.

If your not there, you dont know how hungry people are, if I was there and didnt have any food I would steal to eat. Problem with it? Then you would die.

[edit on 31-8-2005 by SpittinCobra]

I feel that "looting" paints a different picture than what is most likely going on. The people here in these photos are scared, hungary, and need things
that we can get without a second thought.
Diapers and peanut butter do not a heist make.

Originally posted by onlyinmydreams

Ok,

I've just spent the last few minutes in Google Images trying to find pictures of the looting in New Orleans. However.... no matter what reasonable combination of words I type.... I can't get ANY pictures of the looting that is going on. NONE. I've tried every combination I can think of... searches that have mixed and matched words like 'looting', 'katrina', 'new orleans', and 'distaster'... only to constantly get replies that say, "sorry, your search returned no images."

The weird thing about this is that ANY combination of words in Google Images usually generates several photos (even photos that have nohing to do with the subject of the search). I'm beginning to suspect that photos of the looters are being censored online.

you realize all the google images does is search for pictures named with the words you used in your search criteria, right ? so if no one has posted on their blog page "looting in new orleans" you won't find anything....and people down there with arean't exactly sitting around at their computer uploaded images right now


I'm not 100% certain, but news organizations with proprietary photos probably don't allow google to display their copyrighted photos for a certain amount of time, if ever


there must be 1,000,000,000,000 other sources of pictures, what would google accomplish by trying to sandbag any photos ? How embarrassing would it be if they censored photos that were released by other outlets ?


if you're going to throw out a conspiracy theory, please at least give us who is behind it, what the motive is, how it benefits them, and a shred of evidence.


thanks !


oh yeah, and you pretty much just need to go to google news.

images.google.com...




[edit on 31-8-2005 by syrinx high priest]

Hmmm...it seems theyve taken to carjacking now as well...reports of shots being heard thru the night...things are going well I see...

Well,
We will never know what the black guy had in that giant bag of his. 50 loaves of bread? 6000 tablets of medicine? 50 radios that could be used to signal the Coast Guard? 20 life jackets?

And we will also never know what brand of bread the white couple was dragging along. Wholesome? Roman Bread? Golden Bread?

We will simply never be able to tell, from the photo, what each couple was taking.

The fact of the matter, though, is that these were two photos among thousands. It would be profoundly goofy to make conclusions about racism based on two photos... especially in a situation where the overwhelming number of people are going to be black (in other words, as most of the people who were left in NO are black, we can't make any type of argument about racism because there is no real control group).

As for my own google searches: I realize that a specific phrase in quotation marks won't generate a lot of results, but, last night, I performed tons of searches and kept coming up empty. The images had to be censored.

Finders, Looters

Originally posted by WyrdeOne
Quality contribution Helmutt!

[...]
I would applaud you if I could. Thanks for bringing this up.

Way

Done. Since you couldn't, I did.

Actually, I did because it was a very apt find and definitely a case of denying ignorance.

It's easy to look at what's going on in New Orleans and assign some sort of race-oriented analysis to it (as is being widely done in thinly-veiled ways on the Free Republic), but that's bunk.

“White people” loot too. I know, because I've seen it myself.

What's happening in New Orleans is what happens when the social contract is torn up by Nature.

When society breaks down, all the benefits that come with it vanish.

As for racism being “dead” in America, the fact that this has come up at all strongly suggests otherwise.

I wish those suffering in New Orleans the best, though best wishes or even boatloads of cash will do little to make tonight any better for the victims of Katrina.

Originally posted by Hellmutt
I don´t know about google, but take a look at this...

Look at the two of these photos on Yahoo News - notice anything different between them? According to Yahoo, black people "loot" -- white people "find."


Originals:

news.yahoo.com...

news.yahoo.com...

Well done, indeed.

[edit on 1-9-2005 by loam]

Originally posted by onlyinmydreams
so I thought it would be quite easy to find pics of looting on the main Google page (when you go to the 'images' option

They simply must be blocking them.

A google image search on New orleans looter results in "did not match any documents", which is pretty strange. Manhattan looter results in the same.

It's noticing stuff like this that makes me believe racism is alive and well in the media,

The girl in the photo of non looteres is black.
the non looters are clearly carrying bread
the pics are from two entirely different agencies with different photos
the photo on a story about looters shows a theif and says its a looter
the story about people trying to find food in the devastation has a pic captioned as such, iow, two stories, two photos.

shp
you realize all the google images does is search for pictures named with the words you used in your search criteria,

It looks at the words in the surrounding article and page also.

Originally posted by Tomorrow
I feel that "looting" paints a different picture than what is most likely going on. The people here in these photos are scared, hungary, and need things
that we can get without a second thought.
Diapers and peanut butter do not a heist make.

Being scared and hungry is still not justification for taking electronics, jewlrey, firearms and all kinds of other stuff that they don't "need"!

Thats the reason why rescue is taking so long. These people dug their own graves.

Originally posted by onlyinmydreams
Earlier in the day several news sites had photos of looting... so I thought it would be quite easy to find pics of looting on the main Google page (when you go to the 'images' option).

The problem with the way google images works is it depends on the name of the image, or on the alt information of an image. If no alt text was entered for the alt tag, it relies on the image name only. That's why it's often hard to find images of whatever you're looking for, or why you get strange results quite often when looking for specific items.

For example, the following html would display an image of an apple, but because it's alt tag says bananna this image would show up on google under apple (because of the way it's named) and it would also show up under images of a bananna because of the alt text.

< img "an_apple.jpg" alt="This is not a bananna" height="40 width="30" border="0" >

If the image was named "9918221.jpg" in the above example it would only show up under a search for a bananna. The google spider/bot is smart, but doesn't "see" what is inside an image.

This is another semi-important bit people use when optimizing their pages for search engine placement (ranking). If you really want your image of an apple to show up in a google image search, you would also have the word "apple" in the Title tag, at least once in bold text on the page, at least once using a heading tag < h > and you'd also have the word apple in your file name and in the image's alt tag. It also would help tremendously for another website to link to your image with the word apple in the link.

[edit on 4-9-2005 by CatHerder]

Originally posted by Hellmutt
I don´t know about google, but take a look at this...

Racism

Please note that it is not Yahoo who calls these acts by differing names, but rather the original sources. The top picture and caption come from the AP, the lower picture comes from AFP, a French news source.

[edit on 2005/9/4 by GradyPhilpott]

The article says she looted from a grocery store, this seems to be a little much... I mean if it was some sort of diamond store, or Comp USA I'd understand how the background of the story could make a difference... I just can't bring myself to believe that she took something from a grocery store (other than a cash register) that would make it so much worse...