Google has launched an advertising campaign to explain the appearance of racist and anti-Semitic material in its search results, including a picture which depicts Michelle Obama as a monkey.
The search engine giant said in a new ad, "Sometimes Google search results from the internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries.
"We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”
The Google ad appears on a page of image search results for Michelle Obama which includes the offensive depiction of the US First Lady.
The racist image was previously removed by Google due to a complaint, however, that was because the site hosting the image was also serving malware to user's computers.
The image has since been reloaded onto a different site.
Search Engine Land reports that complaints about the image appeared in a Google help forum last week. A Google employee responded explaining that Google does not remove results "simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it."
The ad goes on to read, "Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the internet.
"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results."
Google results are largely based on the popularity of the content displayed. The company said it will remove pages from its search results if they violate its guidelines but it "views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority".