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 …).

Few months after Yahoo!, Google has set up a new copyright filter on its image search. This option allows the user to select a picture free of copyright.

The only way to have access to this option is via the advanced image search, which is not very user friendly.

Google Image Search

This function is obviously good and simple but this is clearly not an original idea, they seem to have copied the idea from Yahoo! They don’t even add anything to it.

 
Google has infuriated Microsoft this week with the Google O.S. and today, they have probably irritated Yahoo! by replicating their function.

 
Google are definitely trying to kill off the competition… and I am not sure that Yahoo! can take it. Between Bing and Google the chances of Yahoo’s continuing success are minimal.

Most of you know the classic search engine reputation management (SERM) format which makes sure that the ten first results (first page) on the search engine result page are neutral or positive.

Ordinarily search engine reputation management is for brand terms such as ‘Nike’, ‘RBS bank ’, and ‘AXA Insurance’…

A lot of companies look at the first page of Google and try to control the ten first results with other corporate and social media websites. Below we can see that McDonald’s did a pretty good job managing the first Google results page.

Google Result Page - Mc Donald's

The majority of these companies don’t ever look at search engine image result page where some malicious picture can be posted against them.

As far as I am aware there is no tool that can monitor the Google search image result page. It has been so far disregarded by search engine reputation management professional/ companies.

It is why some of the largest companies have some negative image result and it doesn’t look like they do anything about it or even that they are aware of it.

SERM - Mc Donald's Search Image Result Page

The worst thing is that it is easier to clear/manage your search image result page that your actual search engine result page (web result). With few SEO tricks on images, you can manage the problem in a couple of weeks.

Maybe a new product to develop

Google launches News Timeline in this lab section. Google News Timeline organises your search results chronologically. This tool allows us to see news, video, magazines etc chronologically by year, month, week and day.

If you want to know what kind of books or movies are out on your birthday you just have to enter the date and Google do the rest (date in US format).

This Google tool is very fast and well presented. Google News Timeline allows the user to look for a specific category, date or topic (via keywords).

Google News Timeline

Generally this tool is great, but the further we go back in the past (e.g. :20 years), the less sources we find (mostly Wikipedia, Time magazine and some baseball news). Also, I am not sure what additional value this tool provides compared to BBC Archive or The Times Archive.

Time Archive

At the end of the day Google News Timeline uses these different sources (the Times, BBC etc…) and compiles them by date.

In conclusion, it is a good tool but not unique. I don’t see a big need for Google News Timeline.

Today Google brings us pictures from LIFE. Google gives us the possibility to see some historical pictures of ‘football’ or a specific event ‘Winter Olympic’ from LIFE via Google Image.

LIFE and Google Image

Google hosts the LIFE photo archive and via this initiative tries to have it own database of pictures. It means that you don’t leave Google website when you click on the picture, Google via LIFE becomes a publisher of content.

The principal is very simple, if you search for picture from LIFE you add ‘source:life’ to the topic that you were looking for on Google image search.

Google Image Result Page (LIFE)

Note that all the new functions (size, source, and colour) of Google image search don’t work with the ‘source:life’. It is not very smart of Google to neglect this.

Anyway, this search is more a gadget than a real new function from Google, but at the same time it shows Google’s aim: to own more and more content.