San Francisco - Google on Wednesday apologized for an offensive picture of US First Lady Michelle Obama that appeared on top of its image search results, and later removed it after initially saying that company policy prevented it from censoring the racist image. The image imposed the picture of a chimpanzee on the face of Michelle Obama and popped up first on the image results list for the first lady's name, just below a link to a suggested Google search for the terms "Michelle Obama Monkey."
According to user complaints on Google's help forum, the offensive image appeared among the top image results on Google for at least two weeks.
Google initially declined to remove the picture, opting instead to explain its policy in an ad on the image results page.
"Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it," Google said.
"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results."
The image was, however, removed early Wednesday. Google offered no explanation for its reversal, but web watchers said it was likely that people had somehow manipulated Google's search results to give an artificially high ranking to the picture, which would have been a violation of Google's guidelines, thereby justifying the company's decision to remove the picture.
