Monkey Holding Box

Introduction

Google’s algorithms are always improving, but they aren’t perfect. If you search for certain things, like scary-looking objects or offensive material, Google will display a warning pop-up box informing you of potential violence in the image results. It’s a useful feature for parents and others who don’t want to expose themselves or their children to disturbing imagery on the internet. However, Google isn’t always accurate in its identification of these images: sometimes it will mistake something harmless with something violent.”

Google’s latest fiasco: Google Images search results are not always accurate or appropriate, it seems.

Google’s algorithm works by identifying images that are similar to the one you’ve searched for. If you look up “monkey,” it will find pictures of monkeys.

But, as we all know from the time our kid went to school with a monkey and we had to explain what a pet store is, not all monkeys are created equal—or even close in appearance.

And Google’s algorithms don’t always work right: The search engine has been known to confuse an African-American child with an ape (yes, really), and it has also confused a lemur with Barack Obama (that was actually pretty funny). In fact, there’s no real way of knowing if these kinds of mistakes will happen at all until they do happen—and then they’re hard to ignore.

Wojcicki explained that the algorithm can’t be applied evenly across different concepts. “It would never work for a query like ‘what are men like,’ because men are very diverse and aren’t all similar enough to cluster together,” she said. “But when the idea is more constrained — like with puppies, or flowers — there may be enough similarities in the images to cluster them, which works for us and for users.”

Google’s algorithms aren’t perfect, and they never will be. But the company is working to make them better, more accurate and relevant to users’ needs.

Google says that its image search results have improved over time as a result of this work — but there are still plenty of reasons why you might see unexpected results when searching for something like “puppies” or “flowers.”

Google Photos has also made some mistakes. In one particularly embarrassing incident from 2015, the app erroneously labeled black people as gorillas. In response, Google changed its policy on how humans were identify in photos, changing from ‘gorilla’ to ‘monkey’.

You might be wondering: How does Google Photos know what a gorilla is? The answer lies in the “Google’s smart algorithms,” which automatically identify people in photos.

And what are these smart algorithms made up of? According to Google, they’re power by machine learning—a type of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to learn from data without being explicitly programm. In other words, they’re basically a bunch of computer programs that have been taught how to recognize black people as monkeys.

The new results don’t work for every search query either. Queries about scary-looking objects can still lead to the pop-up box that warns about violent content. Google’s algorithms aren’t perfect, and it will likely take some time before they’re able to fully parse out context related to one’s intent when searching for something like “monkey holding box.”

However, it’s great to see that even big companies like Google are trying to make their services more accessible and less confusing by both removing unnecessary clutter from their search engine interfaces as well as implementing new features like this one.

Google algorithms aren’t perfect, so keep that in mind when you’re searching!

While it’s still important to keep your search queries accurate and direct, Google algorithms don’t always do the job. If you’re researching a topic that is sensitive or controversial, make sure you double-check the results yourself before taking them at face value.

Conclusion

Google can make mistakes, but it’s also trying to make up for them. The company has released several updates and bug fixes since this issue came to light in order to fix image search results that aren’t appropriate or safe for children (or anyone else). For example, if you search for “puppy” on Google Images today, you’ll see that there are no results with pop-ups showing violent content at all!