Google is now in the Spotlight when Representative Zoe Lofgren asked a question: “Right now if you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. How would that happen? How does search work so that would occur?”
This question was asked to Mr Sundar Pichai the CEO of Google, who answered that Google crawled and stored billions of pages in its index, takes the keyword, matches it against webpages and then ranks them.
He said things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it and based on that at any given time we try and rank and find the best result for any search query.
After which Representative Zoe Lofgren asked: “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the users?”
To that Mr Sundar Pichai replied “Last year we saw over 3 trillion searches, we don’t manually intervene on any given search result.”
Out of curiosity we went to test this and searched for the word “Idiot”. Guess what we got.
Google Search Image Result for “Idiot”
We did really see images of President Donald Trump’s. This was something we did not expect to see.
We went on further to check if this was isolated to Google search. So we went to compare the results with two other popular search engines, Bing and Yahoo.
Bing Search Image Result for “Idiot”
Yahoo Search Image Result for “Idiot”
We thought it was only happening on Google search. We did not expect to see the same results on Bing or Yahoo Search.
Which brings us some questions. Was only Google being question on this? What about other search engine giants? Will they be called to explain the same question to Congress?
