Google: sorry for removing Churchill from search results
Google has apologised for temporarily removing a photo of Sir Winston Churchill from results when searching for ‘British Prime Ministers’.
His absence drew attention on Saturday 15 June, amid debate about Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square.
Many people complained on Twitter, accusing Google of deliberately removing the photo in order to avoid offending people who disapprove of Churchill’s statue.
But Google claimed the photo had actually been missing since April, and its disappearance had been caused by a failed update.
It said that in late April it had been criticised for using a photo of Churchill as a young man, rather than an image of him as Prime Minister during World War 2.
This image had been chosen automatically by Google’s software. Its human reviewers agreed with the criticism that it was “not the most representative” photo of Churchill, and blocked it so the software could replace it with another.
However, Google said that “a bug in our systems” prevented a new image from being added, leaving just a grey silhouette for six weeks (see screenshot 1 ).
In a series of tweets ( www. snipca.com/35132), Google apologised for “any concern”, and said that Churchill’s absence was “not purposeful”.
By Sunday 16 June it had replaced the silhouette with a photo of Churchill as an older man 2 , though only for his second term as Prime Minister (1951 to 1955). His wartime spell at 10 Downing Street isn’t mentioned at all.