Search Google images for abu ghraib, and you get 136 hits, with no explicit scenes of torture or humiliation.
Search Yahoo! Images for abu ghraib, and you get 4,035 hits, including the most notorious shots of abuse, torture, and dead prisoners.
What's going on here? Perhaps we should abandon Google if we can't trust it any more....
(Via Slashdot, where it was reported that google.co.uk doesn't have these problems. Well, I just checked, and it does now.)
UPDATE: It now appears that the explanation is quite simple: Google is incompetent at indexing images. Even more reason to dump them.
You're pointing to something very important. As more and more people depend on web searches to carry on with their work and life, monopoly in search can become far worse than monopoly in operating systems. I've written, in my own turn, about problems with search and with google here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/search/MortazaviBlog?q=Google
. A good place to turn to, for the larger questions regarding search and the fallacies involving it, would be the work of the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus: On the Internet. What if a search engine bars the public, through lower or missing rankings, from accessing critical material about it or about its sponsors? The enginer designers can certainly always blame the algorithms but to what extent can that excuse be acceptable. Most often, it probably will be an acceptable excuse but occasionally it won't . . . and even less often, will we know which case we are dealing with.