Google's stock hit more than $700 per share this week, but the tech company's image took a hit after a "racist" mix-and-match of keywords and images linked a search for Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, who is black, to an image of two Rhesus monkeys, reports Newsweek.
If you searched Google News for Parsons, one of the images that came up was of two Rhesus monkeys, which linked to a story about ex-Merrill Lynch CEO E. Stanley O'Neal, who is also black, and the lack of support for him among the investment bank's board of directors. Google blames the mix-up on automation, which is responsible for culling together news stories and related images for the nearly 40 billion searches it manages each month. "While we don't comment on individual stories on Google News, crawling thousands of sites across the globe is a complicated task, and we're confident that the quality of the crawled pages is extremely good for the vast majority of news sources on our site," Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker told Newsweek. Stricker added that more work needs to be done, and "we're always working on improvements to Google News to ensure that the experience for all of our users ... continues to be great."
Google appeared to have addressed this particular problem last weekend, but the wrong photo came back during the week, which led some to suspect a "racist hacker" was involved. Google denies those allegations as well.
The tech giant isn't the only company to have this problem. Remember when a new feature on Wal-Mart's web site linked a "Planet of the Apes" DVD to movies about African Americans? Automation was cited as the problem then, too—but that time, the feature was taken down. While Google, which told Newsweek it would fix the problem "as soon as possible," may not be able to emulate Wal-Mart's move and just shut the system down, the company's lacking movement on the issue has some asking why the company isn't taking the offense seriously enough.
