Watch Google CEO Sundar Pichai explain why googling ‘idiot’ brings up Donald Trump’s pictures
American lawmakers were suspicious.
The search for the word “idiot” on Google apparently saw a jump after it was found a few months ago that it threw up images of US President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, American lawmakers attempted to understand how Google search algorithms worked and asked the tech company’s CEO Sundar Pichai about this particular case.
Republican congresswoman Zoe Lofgren posed the question during a grilling of the Google executive by the House judiciary committee. Pichai replied that the search results are based on ranks that takes into account over 200 factors, including relevance and popularity, to find the best results for a query. The questioning came after Trump’s multiple tweets accusing Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles about him.
The Google chief was also asked if it was an example of political bias in algorithms, which he denied. Still, some Republican lawmakers on the panel refused to believe an individual or a group of people at Google could not change the algorithms and manipulate the search results arbitrarily.