Google may be a lot faster at indexing web content these days, so much faster that people have become spoiled and expect search engines to have items instantly in their databases. When Aboutrika displayed a "Sympathize with Gaza" message on a t-shirt under his jersey during the African Nations Cup, some searchers hit Google to find a photo of that.

Evidently their failure to find it immediately led to complaints of censorship and undue Israeli influence at Google. Cutts published a reply from Google’s images team to those critics along with a little history of search indexing at Google:

First of all let’s put the story straight: we definitely didn’t do this. In fact from the very beginning you could find the image quite easily on YouTube and also on Google News.

The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot, as explained here. It’s there now – you can find several copies of the image on a search for [Aboutrika] or [Aboutrika Gaza] quite easily.

"Please don’t assume that Google has negative intentions just because you don’t see a particular image," Cutts said. "When I joined Google in early 2000, we measured the time to update our index in months."

It read: Sympathize with Gaza.

When images of the statement did not appear on Google’s image index, the conspiracy theories began. When the image didn’t appear a few days after the match, Google was flooded with enough accusations that the company censored the image at the request of the Israeli government that the Google Images team was compelled to respond.

Matt Cutts lent the blogp-space on his blog to clear things up.

The Google EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) Team said all images could take a few days to appear in the index:

"[W]e definitely didn’t do this," they wrote. "The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot…. No-one [sic] from any government has contacted us about this image, and we have no reason to remove it."

They further point out that the image is available now when searching for [Aboutrika] or [Aboutrika Gaza].

Cutts reminds readers in that blog post that indexing images takes time, and that Google has made significant progress over the years since it once took months instead of days to index images.