Last updated on December 18th, 2018 at 07:15 am
Right now one of the most heated issues in the United States of America is that when someone searches the word ‘Idiot’ in Google’s search engine and click in the images section, then the face of the President of the United States Donald Trump shows up.
The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai was called in a House Judiciary Committee hearing. He was asked many questions and was also asked to explain why the Google search for images results into pictures of President Donald Trump. He was also asked if it was done intentionally. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai had to explain to the House Judiciary Committee that why searching for ‘Idiot’ shows President Donald Trump. Pichai spoke in front of the House Judiciary Committee. He explained that the company does not manually take part in the search results. He added that the search results are based the most trending, crawling contents and issues in the web pages.
CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai’s explanation
“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of their pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai said.
“Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query,” he added.
The question was put forward by Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, who was apparently trying to help Pichai.
“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 explained in general about how the Google returns results. They are due to relating to the algorithm which is based on billions of keywords which are ranked according to 200 factors.
“Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals — things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it,” he said.
“And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’s how we make sure the process is working,” he added.
“So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?” Lofgren responded sarcastically.
“This is working at scale, and we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result,” Pichai stressed.
George W. Bush’s google-bombing
Though Donald Trump is not the only first president to become the victim of google-bombing. Former President George W. Bush was also targeted in the 2000s. Whenever you search for “miserable failure” Bush’s photo showed up.
