LADIES and gentlemen, I have good news. New Orleans has been rebuilt!
Trees have been replanted. Homes have been restored. Businesses and tourist sites are standing as though Hurricane Katrina had never happened.
You can see it all for yourself, courtesy of Google. Go ahead. Look up its satellite images of the city.
Then cringe.
Brings a whole new meaning to “virtual reality,” doesn’t it?
I wish I could say this was an April Fool’s prank. But nobody’s laughing. Google really did remove its images of a hurricane-stricken New Orleans. It really did replace them with outdated pictures from before the disaster. And it really is catching hell for it.
“Google’s use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history,” Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., wrote in a letter to the company. He wants an explanation. So do many current and former New Orleans residents.
So far they haven’t gotten much of one.
“The latest update from one of our information providers substantially improved the imagery detail of the New Orleans area,” John Hanke, Google’s director for maps and imagery, said in a press release about the switch.
I like that. “Improved the imagery detail.” The images you see here may bear no resemblance to reality, but by gosh, they’re clear! What’s a few ruined blocks between friends, anyway?
Why is this such a big deal? Good question. After all, Google is a private company. As long as it stays within the law, it can put little green men on its Web site if it wants. And surely by now, most of us know to take what we see on the Net with a grain of salt the size of Bay St. Louis.
It’s just that ... well ... most of us had come to trust Google. In my experience, it was the first search engine that ever made sense. After spending my college years stumbling through Webcrawlers or trying to Ask Jeeves a question it could answer, it was a relief to find something that was clear, efficient and actually found the information I wanted.
This tarnishes that a little.
The concerns go beyond the sentimental, though. This whole episode underlines the key problem of the information age — holding the gatekeepers accountable.
I write for a newspaper that has about 8,000 readers. If I screw up, they let me hear about it. And if they have to do it too many times, I may be writing somewhere else. People here know the paper and how to keep us honest.
But the bigger the institution, the harder that becomes. Think NBC is slanting the news? A sponsor boycott might work — maybe. Don’t like the stuff that Viacom is putting out these days? Go ahead and take your business elsewhere ... if you can find an elsewhere, that is.
When you get to the size and scale of a Google, how do you hold them accountable? How do you remind them that, when it comes to information, credibility is everything?
I’m not sure. But it needs to happen. Soon.
This isn’t the first time Google has put its credibility on the line. Last year, the company agreed to censor the Chinese version of its search engine to satisfy the Communist government. The decision drew heavy criticism, despite Google’s position that some access to information was better than none.
Now we’ve been twice burned.
Unlike some, I don’t consider the Katrina business a conspiracy, just stupidity. But it’s stupidity the search engine can’t afford. Sooner or later those mistakes will catch up, whether through a shareholder protest or a Congressional inquiry.
Generating hits is easy. Taking hits is a lot more painful.
Scott Rochat’s e-mail address is rochat@emporiagazette.com.