Could Google have been hacked? That is what many users were led to believe after multiple searches using Google's image search turned out several images of a car crash that seems to have occurred in Russia.
A vast majority of users have turned up on Google's support forums on Tuesday, saying that the image of a badly wrecked vehicle sitting next to a sign that says "Stop" in Russian has appeared on their image searches, whether or not they searched for Russian car crash images. One user named Cat M. says she went on Google Images to search for cartoon images of planet Earth but found the car crash photo occupying most of the search results instead.
Various other searches, such as those for "Emmy's," "puppy" and even "Hello Kitty," were reported to have brought up the same images. Reports came from several countries, including Canada, Brazil and Germany, suggesting that the issue was not limited to a single geographical area. It is not clear whether the image was altered, and not all searches turned up the same image.
With the ongoing fight between the Ukrainian administration and anti-government, pro-Russian groups, it is easy to see why some believe that the image, which comes from Karpat News, a Ukrainian news website that reported on a car crash that killed three people, was the result of cyber-criminals infiltrating the world's biggest search engine.
However, Google remains mum as to what caused the glitch, only saying that the issue has been fixed and that they could have just shown images of micropigs instead. The company dashboard that monitors the status of all apps and services does not even contain a reference to the earlier disruption on Google Images.
Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo, provides a possible explanation. Weinberg believes that the problem may have been due to test queries used during algorithm testing. Whenever a search engine updates its algorithm, its engineers test searches to make sure the updates work properly. However, sometimes, these test searches could be left behind in the code once the algorithm takes effect. Weinberg stresses this is only a possibility but says it has happened once with DuckDuckGo.
Some, however, are not quick to believe in this explanation.
"Everybody is confused about how this could happen on such a large scale," says A.J. Ghergich, founder of an SEO marketing agency. "How does the largest search engine in the world roll out an update and not notice that 90% of image search results show a car crash in Russia?"
