Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has been asked to explain why searching the word “idiot” on the global search engine shows images of US President Donald Trump.
Appearing before a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Pachai was asked to explain the scenario by California Representative Zoe Lofgren.
“Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” she notes. “How would that happen?”
In response, the Google CEO says the company doesn’t “manually intervene” in search results and that search results are based on crawling the content of web pages.
“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 says.
“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 adds.
The house team convened the hearing to discuss whether Google’s search results are politically biased.
