Why did an offensive Greggs logo show up in Google's web search?

Elena Cresci
theguardian.com, Tuesday 19 August 2014 10.12 EDT

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The logo which appeared when searching for Greggs using Google search.

Greggs fell afoul of the Google algorithm on Tuesday when an alternative logo popped up to anyone searching for the company.

Instead of the company’s official logo, an image with the slogan: “Providing shit to scum for over 70 years.” Classist, crass and a far cry from the company’s actual slogan: “Always fresh. Always tasty.” But it caused a giggle on Twitter, nonetheless.

@samhesling1 we certainly have! Praying to the google gods it gets fixed soon!
— Greggs (@GreggstheBakers) August 19, 2014

Cue a social media nightmare for the purveyors of reasonably-priced sausage rolls, whose communications team were quick to respond to amused tweeters via their official account.

But how does this even happen? Some tweeters were quick to blame “a disgruntled employee”. We don’t know who created the logo, which appears to have been around since 2010, but the search bit certainly has nothing to do with Greggs.

It’s not an isolated problem by any means. As other news organisations have pointed out, if you search for the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn, you get a picture of him with his mouth replaced by another orifice. And earlier this month you got some interesting results when searching for Skellow in Yorkshire.

Both the Greggs and the Littlejohn images come from Uncyclopedia, a satirical version of Wikipedia. But the images and the site are hosted by Wikia, a free web hosting service which hosts images and other content for all sorts of user-driven sites, called wikis. So it hosts images for everything, satirical or not.

Google writes programs and formulas to try and get the best results possible for anyone searching for a specific topic. It has a lot to do, crawling more than 60 trillion individual pages across the internet to find the content most applicable to what people want to see. Pages are ranked by Google according to how useful they are.

The problem is, because Wikia hosts a great deal of reliable content and is probably marked as a quality source, Google’s algorithm can’t really tell the picture is satirical. And, presumably, no human at Google has checked as of yet.

On the plus side, whoever fixes it gets all these doughnuts.