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Country Stereotypes via Google Images  (View post)

Michael Keukert [PersonRank 1]

Wednesday, December 6, 2006
17 years ago7,318 views

Hmm.... did you cheat on New Zealand, were you too concerned about PC, or were the SERPS updated in the meantime?

I get this:

http:// newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images
/39500000/jpg/_39500731_madge203.jpg

With this query: http://images.google.de/images?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-17,GGGL:de&q=new%20zealand%20woman&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

[Edited image link as it's potentially NSFW – Tony]

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Michael, I get the same image as you do – a nude woman with four breasts being milked. As the Country Stereotypes page disclaims, I removed explicit nudity and violence, which I did in this case.

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

And trust me, Indian women are not that ugly

Travis Harris [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

yup... for US it shows fat people... that about sums us up!

Michael Keukert [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Should have read better... The image you selected for Sweden nevertheless shows nudity.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Whoops, I actually missed that the Swedish (?) woman was topless. Will adjust.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It works good for "Cuban" & "Greek", and strange for "Portuguese" :)

Personman [PersonRank 8]

17 years ago #

Is there a reason why the captions for the Iraqi, Israeli, and American people are the names of their countries, rather than their nationalities?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

No particular reason, I suppose it's more correct the way you wrote it Personman (I'm no native speaker)... except for maybe "American" which might not be specific enough when you mean "US" (e.g. Google might return results from "south-american man").

david sanger [PersonRank 7]

17 years ago #

Well Philipp. You got just one of mine in there. You ought to include ackowledgment that they are all copyrighted images. In this case it seems a reasonable "fair use" copyright exception which sometimes covers "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research,'

Still readers should know that random use of others' copyrighted images is otherwise infringement.

For travel photography, of course, stereotypes are expected – that's just the industry.

Generally though Google Images does a poor job with search relevance, in part because it cannot read embedded metadata like IPTC caption fields. Also it relies too much on the jpg name. Many pages also contain few helpful keywords.

david sanger [PersonRank 7]

17 years ago #

Actually "fair use" doesn't remove the need for a credit – like adding the link to the originating page...

dogofdirk [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

When you search for "dutch man", you obviously are asking Google what English speaking people think the image should be. So I re-did your search for my own country with the Dutch translation of the searches.

http://dirkie.nu/2006/12/07/stereo-tiep/

(Article is in Dutch)

Stephan Locher [PersonRank 9]

17 years ago #

I wonder how many of the people in this pictures are from the country the refer to.

If you search for Swiss Man the second best picture is a "Swiss Man" so called by the BBC who protests against the war in 2003. I remember does protests and a lot of the people protesting in Berne and around Switzerland where not swiss people.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

> You ought to include ackowledgment that
> they are all copyrighted images.

There is an "All images by their respective owners" note, and I credited the source (Google) as all images were hosted on Google's servers. But in retrospect I think you might be right, I should've credited the real source of the images somewhere on the page (maybe in a big footnote collecting all URLs) and not just "Google". It's a subtle issue though and I'm no copyright lawyer, e.g. do I have to credit 18 different sources whenever I publish a screenshot of a Google Image search result (which shows 18 thumbnails, and for the sake of argument, we'll assume that the URLs are not readable at the reproduced size)?

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

No, it's just fair use. It's like making a screenshot of an image search SERP. Do you have to credit each and every image owner?

Tadeusz Szewczyk [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Damn Philipp! Where did you get this party pic of mine? Hey people, I just dressed in that way to match German expectations and to fit in. I'm Polish.

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I like this stereotype search things you do Philipp. The German one is pretty funny!

justin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

ha! "Irish man" is pure stereotype.

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=irish+man&btnG=Search+Images

and "scottish man"
http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&q=scottish+man&btnG=Search

Juha-Matti Laurio [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

When searching "finnish man" the first hit – a man with a sausage – is very typical!!
;-)

http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&q=finnish+man&btnG=Search

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