Followed with the appearance of Google CEO Sundar Pichai in front of a bunch of US lawmakers to answer some 'tough' questions, one of the many questions asked was why googling the word 'idiot' led to US President Donald Trump's image.
Also, read: Xiaomi Poco F1 gets a price cut in India, Now starts at Rs 19,999
Hilarious enough, the question had come from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) who alleged that Google was politically manipulating search results. “Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” she said. “How would that happen?”
Pichai went on to answer the question by explaining Congress how Google's search algorithm actually functioned. According to Google's CEO, the algorithm collates data from millions of web pages in order to generate results for a term that is searched on the platform and any time a keyword is searched, the Google algorithm tries to match it with the web pages in its index. The results are then ranked in accordance to its signals that comprise of freshness, relevance, popularity and how people use it, among other things. Google uses a total of 200 signals to rank the search results. These results then get evaluated on the basis of external radars...to objective guidelines."
What Pichai basically said was that when someone searches Google images, results are shown of images that have used the term as a meta tag, which in the real world translates to thousands of people that have uploaded images of Trump with 'idiot' as a tag, resulting to his image.
On further response to Lofgren's queries, Pichai assured the Congress that it wasn't little men who were sitting behind the search screen at Google trying to mess with Donald Trump.
Well, things didn't end there as many more questions were posed at Pichai, but to his response, it didn't feel like the Google CEO was grilled at all during the public testimony by the US Congress as the ageing lawmakers probably didn't have any idea of how the Internet actually functioned.
Apart from Trump photos, Sundar Pichai faced very little heat answering the US lawmakers. Read more, on how Sundar Pichai got house grilled on the breach, China censorship.
Also, read: Google to shut down its smart messaging app Allo after March 2019
