Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, California, why search results for “idiot” turn up pictures of President Trump. The GOP has accused the tech giant of bias.
A U. S. House committee grilled Google’s CEO on Tuesday about possible bias on the search engine — including image search results for “idiot” that might not please the president.
“Right now, if you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren said at the hearing. “How would that happen? How does search work so that would occur?”
Lofgren, who represents San Jose, California, said before asking the question that she believes “it’s important to talk about how search works.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave the House Judiciary Committee a detailed explanation.
“Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of (web) 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,” Pichai explained. “And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query.
