Following my post on McDonald’s search engine reputation management and image issues, a similar issue has arisen with a personality: Michelle Obama.

When you are looking for ‘Michelle Obama’ on Google Images the first result is a picture of her looking like a monkey or ape. It is obviously a racist and offensive image.

Michelle Obama on Google Images

The official comment from Google is:

“Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.”

This is the official answer to deter companies and individuals from complaining about every negative result relevant to their brands or name. Google has been sued many times and is always successful in these cases on the basis that they use an algorithm and the search results are not a choice.

In this case I am pretty sure that they will make an exception, I don’t see the White house doing a SERM campaign.

Anyway, this example once again illustrates how important is to manage your search engine reputation, not only the web result but all kind of result (image, video …).