UPDATE: The initial site, Hot Girls, which posted the offensive image of Michelle Obama has removed it and posted an apology. Google still maintains its position and will not remove it from its search engine. Read More.

For the past two weeks, the top result for a search on Google images of the U.S. first lady Michelle Obama is an offensive caricature that replaces her face with that of a chimpanzee, which Google refuses to take down.

The photo, which has been dubbed online as Michelle Obama Monkey does not appear on Google's rival search engines like Microsoft's Bing or Yahoo.

In Google's defense, it placed the image in the Offensive Search Results page and said that sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree.

The image does not appear among image results when users search for Michelle Obama on its main search engine, only if the query is done in the image search engine.

Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it, a Google employee named Jem wrote on the forum last week.

Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query, Google said in a statement.

We apologize if you've had an upsetting experience using Google. We hope you understand our position regarding offensive results, the company concluded.

Michelle Obama Google Yahoo