Fri 29 Feb 2008
Testing the Accuracy of a Google Celebrity Image Search
Posted by The Jay under Celebrity , Keanu Reeves , Renee Zellweger , Tom Cruise , Bad Celebrity Pictures , Dakota Fanning , Paris Hilton , Halle Berry , Katie Holmes , Celebritards , Katherine Heigl1 Comment
As a entertainment blogger it’s important that I’m able to find just the right picture to go with a particular story. If I’m writing about, say, Tara Reid being a model citizen, as I do, and I type “Tara Reid Model Citizen” into the Google Image search, it’s imperative I find just the right picture of her drunkenly passed out on the streets of Ibiza (the joke comes from the irony!). My blogger brethren and I depend on image searches to add visual stimulation to our pieces, punctuate jokes, and sometimes, to create whole posts.
I’m continually amazed by the accuracy of Google’s image search engine. No matter how disparate my search terms, I can always seem to find what I’m looking for. It gets me to wondering just how far I can test Google’s accuracy. If I type in a celebrity and then add a random word onto the search, what would I find? Would “Jodie Foster + tuna” get me a shot of The Jodes from Freaky Friday, enjoying being in her Mom’s body just a bit too much, or just another boring publicity still from Flightplan? I had to know…
So here is a little experiment I ran to see just how accurate a Google Celebrity Image Search can be (all results found on page 1 of the search results):
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Search Terms: Katherine Heigl + douchebag
Result: Yep, that’s her looking pretty douche-y all right. Like she sails! Or wears white pants after Labor Day! Or isn’t a douche!
Accuracy Grade: A
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Search Terms: Katie Holmes + outer space
Result: I don’t know about you, but that’s the look I had on my face the first time I saw an alien living amongst us and realized it was actually my husband who had signed me to a five-year wedding contract stating I would bear him a genetically created pod baby that looks asian and kinda Chris Klein-y and not wear a bra when I run the NYC Marathon.

Accuracy Grade: A-
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Search Terms: Christian Slater + suicide
Result: Not sure what exactly I expected to find here, but I’m fairly amused that MC Hammer is exploiting the hypothetical death of the star of Kuffs. Greetings and salutations, Slater is NOT too legit to quit.

Accuracy Grade: C (but a “B+” for pure morbidity)
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Search Terms: Keanu Reeves + genius
Result: I don’t understand how anyone could find Keanu stupid. See him walking away from a horny, near-naked Lauren Graham? That’s the wisest decision a man can make in his life! He just chose the grail cup!

Accuracy Grade: A
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Search Terms: Dakota Fanning + assassin
Result: Get on her bad side and the last thing you see in this world is her tiny little boot coming down on your face, as you lay limp on the ground of a dirty street in Mexico.

Accuracy Grade: A
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Search Terms: Val Kilmer + polite
Result: Funny, I don’t remember typing in “Val Kilmer + beached whale”, but hey, at least he’s covered up. That’s a splash of beach etiquette.

Accuracy Grade: B-
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Search Terms: Halle Berry + dentist
Result: I know that when I think of Halle Berry getting her teeth worked on, the first image that comes to my mind is of the former Bond girl half-nakedly fondling Sarah Jessica Parker. Isn’t it the same for you?
Accuracy Grade: B
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Search Terms: Paris Hilton + relevant
Result: Think long and hard about this (that’s what she said!): of all the contributions to society given by Paris Hilton, from the unpublicized humanitarian work in third world countries to her charitable donations for Cancer research, and tireless work to improve the lives of the US homeless population, when you think of Paris Hilton, don’t you really just think about her sucking on something?
Accuracy Grade: A
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Search Terms: Tom Cruise + smart
Result: Well… this one is dead on!

Accuracy Grade: A+
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Search Terms: Renee Zellweger + bitchface
Result: I swear to you I didn’t rig this. It just so happens that when you search for a picture of Renee Zellweger making a bitchface, my award badge for being one of the Best Culture Blogs on the net shows up in the results (as the third image!). What can I say, Google knows where’s it at.

Accuracy Grade: A++++++
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Final Conclusion: No matter what you’re looking for on the net, be it a shot of Val Kilmer coming ashore to rest his blowhole and lay eggs or Halle Berry molesting the star of Sex and the City, Google Image Search has got your back. I deem their celebrity image search dead-on balls accurate!
Bangarang!



In many ways celebrities are exactly like Transformers. They may walk through the day in their “civilian” form, but when the time comes they transform into all manner of characters (doctors, lawyers, cowboys, the pervert from Happiness played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman; which should not be confused with the pervert he played in Boogie Nights. Or Capote.). Their livelihood is predicated on the audience believing their transformation. And their ability to do so convincingly is what makes us love them. This is why the success of Michael Bay’s Transformers is not at all surprising. Audiences want to see transformation, whether in celebrity or robot form (it also helps that in robot form they blow a bunch of shit up and fight each other. Also, long lingering shots of Megan Fox’s abs doesn’t hurt.). We want to watch an epic spectacle of people overcoming obstacles, growing up in the face of adversity, finding love, becoming better people, and long lingering shots of Megan Fox’s abs. Transformers has all of those things, plus occasionally big fucking robots fight each other.
Whenever I pull a J.D. from Scrubs and start daydreaming absurdist pop culture scenarios (like really, where would I hide all my body hair if I transformed into Dakota Fanning? Precocious child stars do not look like tiny manscaped clones of Robin Williams.), I like to extend my imagination into the realm of celebrity. As soon as I started picturing myself becoming the tiny star of Uptown Girls, I was flooded with thoughts about what celebrities might transform into, besides the characters they play on-screen.
The Celebrity Decepticons
Today, I, and the rest of the world, or at least the Hollywood tabloidista, will honor the birth of one of the entertainment industry’s biggest and best coked out, rehab-shucking, talent-eroding, knife-wielding, weight dropping, boytoy banging, crazy as hell Celebritards since the Olsen twins turned eighteen. Yes, that’s right, batten down the hatches, order extra cases of Red Bull and Grey Goose, stay off the streets and hide your children, Lindsay Lohan turns 21 today. And we here at TheJay.com would like to celebrate this momentous occasion by bestowing 21 birthday wishes on our favorite former hottie who inexplicably dropped twenty pounds, took out her implants, died her hair blonde, started doing mass amounts of blow, showed up in a string of shitty movies, alienated the Disney crowd, put her imlants back in, when to rehab, crashed her car, went back into rehab, became tabloid fodder to the point where the paparazzi are bored of her and pretty much ruined any chance of becoming an all-time masturbatory redhead fantasy we all thought she would be, but instead ended up being considered sleazier than Paris Hilton (and Paris Hilton is a fucking convict!).
As is tradition at TheJay.com, we’d like to take the time to honor and celebrate the birth of celebrity off-spring. And there’s no better way to do that then by supposing what some other big name celebrities might be saying to the proud, new parents. And by new parents I mean just Julia Roberts. Except of course when the paparazzi are around, then that also includes her charming civilian husband Danny Moder. Since the birth of Julia’s new baby boy Henry came in so under the wire that most people still haven’t realized it actually happened a week ago (hey, the Paris machine doesn’t stop for anything, least of all the third kid of an aging American Sweetheart. Unless the kid came out with three arms, or black, we’d rather hear what Paris is reading in jail. Her thoughts on the Harry Potter series are quite illuminating), we’re gonna follow suit with this post, seven days after the fact. This way we get to honor two traditions, the birth of a celebrity baby and procrastination!
Matthew Perry: Could my television show BE any more cancelled! So yeah, congrats on the third kid. Sorry it never worked out between us. What with you being the biggest movie star in the world at the time and me being on a show people actually liked, you’d think it would have worked. Course Brad and Jennifer disproved that theory. Whoa, just think, if we had gotten together, there’s a chance I’d be banging Angelina Jolie and starring in stuff people don’t find soul-crushingly pretentious, and you’d be mirthlessly dating Vince Vaughn. Life, huh? Could it BE any more random!
Keifer Sutherland: Julia, I came to see the baby. (Pulls a gun.) WHERE’S THE BABY???? You have five seconds to tell me where the baby is or I will shoot your civilian husband in his non-famous leg. TELL ME WHERE HE IS!!!!! 5! 4! (cocks gun) 3! 2! Oh wait, there he is. Didn’t see him there in the crib. Very cute, Jules!
This month brings us The Prestige, a flick about dueling magicians, as well as being yet another in a string of movies released this year to star the dewy blonde fleshpot, Scarlett Johansson. And while many people will be going to see Batman and Wolverine duke it out to see who gets to kill David Blaine’s great-great grandfather, an even greater number of people will be going for one simple reason: to see if Scarlett finally, at long last, gets naked. Well, I’ll save you all some time. She doesn’t. And she won’t in any movie for the foreseeable future. And that sucks. Because as the reigning sex symbol in Hollywood she sells herself as the personification of adolescent male fantasy, yet seemingly refuses to bestow us the honor of showing us the chest pillows we men dream of laying our heads on. What kind of modern sex symbol would be so selfish?
Getting naked doesn’t hold the same stigma it once did. It used to be that if you stripped onscreen you were branded, or typecast, as someone cheap enough to disgrace the acting profession with their evil jumblies. Case in point, Meryl Streep has never been naked in a movie (not that we’d want to see it). But now we don’t think poorly of someone who exposes her blouse bunnies. In fact, we commend them. We applaud their willingness to give their all, to bare their entirety, to us, the little people. That they grace us with their nude presence makes them heroes to a nation of men so overloaded with sexual imagery in advertising and pop culture as a whole, that the only thing that really holds weight anymore is classic movie nudity. Trust me, internet porn is all well and good, but it doesn’t compare to being pleasantly surprised by Katie Holmes’s Cruise-less boobies in the third act of The Gift. That’s Joey from Dawson’s Creek, those are her boobies, and the screen is sixty feet big! Tell me how you top that with a low res jpeg on your Apple iBook? You can’t! Movie Nudity has become the classiest smut on the market. It’s almost high class. And as anyone who’s seen Charlize Theron’s nude work in Two Days in the Valley can attest, it may even be art.
When an actress comes on to the scene, and is even remotely attractive, men across the world start an unofficial clock in their heads, that counts down to the moment they get naked onscreen. It’s why we buy those magazines like Stuff and FHM; we’re hoping to catch a preview of future naked goods to come. And when they finally do get naked, we rejoice and thank the girl for her generosity. And we become lifelong fans. Do you think the Cruise-Holmes ship would be so frenetic if she was merely the lead female in a crappy, now-canceled WB teen drama? I think not. But when you give like she gave, we give back. So you see nudity can help build a loyal fanbase. Nudity can help make you seem vulnerable in the eyes of critics and Academy voters. Nudity can buy you a house in Malibu (assuming you are as shrewd an extortionist as Halle). From where I, and rest of the male population stand, nudity has no downside.
WINONA RYDER
JESSICA BIEL
KATE BOSWORTH
BEA ARTHUR


