[sullivandanny]

The image was not removed purposefully. Images in the Knowledge Graph can update at any time. If they do, they briefly disappear. That's what seems to be happening here. We're exploring the issue more. Here's more info we posted about it: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065

[thu2111]

As a former Google engineer and someone who still holds some quantity of Google stock, I hope you publish a post-mortem about this. Even if it's something embarrassing like "someone added a picture to Wikipedia and our algorithm couldn't disambiguate it" or worse, "an internal employee went rogue and we're strengthening our procedures".

Because frankly this bug is catastrophic for Google's credibility in the UK. Nobody will believe this is some random bug or coincidence, it quite transparently is not. Even if the problem isn't directly caused by Google employees but just the engine being confused by the turmoil out on the net, that's not the simplest possible explanation and thus in the absence of other information, it's not what people will conclude.

Since Google became more publicly left-wing and committed to social justice type causes, it has to work harder to convince people it's unbiased. YouTube has been deleting videos of anyone who criticised the COVID lockdowns, including actual epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winners, and that's been widely publicised. So going into this event you're already being perceived as a part of the mainstream establishment censorship machine. And now this - it looks exactly like the people blacking out their instagram photos in solidarity with BLM.

Politicians in the UK are currently receiving enormous quantities of anger from the population about the desecration of war memorials and war heros. It's an issue that's triggered huge public feeling. Google doesn't want to get sucked into that. A rigorous technical post mortem could show people what really happened and avert a political disaster.

[seesawtron]

They decided to give a brief explaination but a post-mortem report like you ask wouldn't likely happen without involving the law. But again have governments ever fined or accussed search engines for misinformation or disinformation in the recent histoy? They have been fined probably for lack of moderation I guess, does anyone know?

[x38iq84n]

The explanation is a load of BS. This "brief disappearance" has been going on for >12 hours now and as far as everybody is aware only one person is affected by this.

[throwaway_12351]

Mate, good luck explaining that to your UK customers. This is beyond acceptable for any group of people.