Yahoo and Google looks for Hatsune Miku
ITmedia reports that both Yahoo Japan and Google are now investigating their image search servers to try and find out why users are unable to get any relevant hits when searching for Hatsune Miku using their image search engine.
Google believes that there might be a bug in the system, and the same problem might be affecting other keywords too. Yahoo on the other hand, doesn’t give any search results at all, and they’re viewing it as a very serious problem and hope to fix it as fast as possible.
Both companies do not keep any search result logs for image searches, so they don’t know when the problem started happening. Both companies also have their search engine servers based in the US and they have to talk to the programmers in the US to fix this problem, which might take a while.
Excite and Infoseek image search also have the same problem when searching for Hatsune Miku, but Excite is using Yahoo’s engine while Infoseek is using Google’s engine.
I didn’t expect that the companies would actually respond to this…
October 18th, 2007 at 9:12 am
It’s because Google only update their image cache very infrequently.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Well, guess Google and Yahoo don’t like to perpetuate some conspiracy theories.
And I bet they’re crazy for Miku themselves.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
I also realised yesterday that the big IT sites were reporting about the missing Hatsune Miku stuff too, I’d thought it was one of the small things that everybody would have a laugh at and stop caring in 5 minutes.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Uh oh, looks like our virtual-idol is a bit camera shy?
October 20th, 2007 at 10:27 am
It would make sense that Google and Yahoo would be concerned about a certain search pattern going completely missing. For Google it is their whole business and if word goes out that their search isn’t functioning properly people might lose trust in it and go to other engines.