While speaking to a congressional committee about privacy, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was forced to school Congress on how Google search works after a Democratic Representative said she image searched the word idiot and found pictures of Donald Trump. While speaking to a congressional committee about privacy, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was forced to school Congress on how Google search works after a Democratic Representative said she image searched the<\/b>
\nToday, something similar happened during the hearings. As noted by The Verge, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) claimed during the proceedings to have „irrefutable“ proof that Google’s search results were biased against conservatives. Rep. Smith was referring to a study by Google critic Robert Epstein, and a study published by PJ Media, which the author himself called „non-scientific.“
After this took place, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) attempted to prove that Google search was not politically biased when she surprisingly asked, „Right now, if you google the word ‚idiot‘ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that. How would that happen?“
Pichai then schooled the committee on how Google search works, explaining how the keyword (in this case, idiot) is matched against billions of web pages stored by Google. The possible results are ranked based on things like „relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it“ and comes up with a response. The executive added that „This is working at scale, and we don\u2019t manually intervene on any particular search result.“
„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 \u2014 things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. 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\u2019s how we make sure the process is working.-Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google
In this particular case, Trump critics knowledgeable about search engine optimization were able to game the results so that a image search for idiot would show pictures of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n