"We apologize if you've had an upsetting experience using Google. We hope you understand our position regarding offensive results," says a house ad from "the Google team" served up in conjunction with image results for queries on the first lady's name.
"Search results are a reflection of the content on the web. Our search results simply reflect what's out there," Google spokesman Scott Rubin explained. "According to the way our algorithm works, when we try to deliver the most relevant search results based on other pages that link to it and so on, this is what is returned."
He said it was possible that the image ranked so high because people were linking to it to condemn it, but noted that there was no way for the company to know for sure. Page rank is the result of "more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms," according to Google.
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