Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, California, why search results for \u201cidiot\u201d turn up pictures of President Trump. The GOP has accused the tech giant of bias.<\/b>
\nA U. S. House committee grilled Google\u2019s CEO on Tuesday about possible bias on the search engine \u2014 including image search results for \u201cidiot\u201d that might not please the president.
\u201cRight now, if you Google the word \u2018idiot\u2019 under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,\u201d Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren said at the hearing. \u201cHow would that happen? How does search work so that would occur?\u201d
Lofgren, who represents San Jose, California, said before asking the question that she believes \u201cit\u2019s important to talk about how search works.\u201d
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave the House Judiciary Committee a detailed explanation.
\u201cAny 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 \u2014 things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it,\u201d Pichai explained. \u201cAnd based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query.\u201d
Pichai also explained some quality control measures.
\u201cThen we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s how we make sure the process is working.\u201d
When a McClatchy reporter did an image search for \u201cidiot\u201d on Tuesday after the question was asked, all but four of the top 17 pictures that came up included the president or his two adult sons. Some of those images were associated with articles about the fact that Googling \u201cidiot\u201d brings up pictures of the president. The first photo that appeared wasn\u2019t actually Trump \u2014 it was a Belgian painter\u2019s work called \u201cThe Idiot,\u201d which appears on the Wikipedia page for the word \u201cidiot.\u201d
Pichai\u2019s answer appeared to please Lofgren.
\u201cSo it\u2019s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we\u2019re going to show the users,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s basically a compilation of what users are generating and trying to sort through that information.\u201d
House Republicans said they wanted to hold the hearing \u2014 entitled \u201c Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices \u201d \u2014 to make sure the search giant is being impartial.
\u201cAmericans put their trust in big tech companies to honor freedom of speech and champion open dialogue,\u201d Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia said in a statement before the hearing.
The House committee has questioned YouTube, Twitter and Facebook executives at separate hearings on bias in big tech, as well as social media personalities Diamond and Silk and others.
Trump himself has accused Google of surfacing negative news about him over positive stories.
\u201cGoogle search results for \u2018Trump News\u2019 shows only the viewing\/reporting of Fake News Media,\u201d the president wrote on Twitter in August. \u201cIn other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent.\u201d
Lawmakers at Tuesday\u2019s hearing pointed to a couple studies in criticizing Google for possible bias, but instances cited were from \u201cless-than-authoritative sources,\u201d Axios reports.
\u201cTo date, no credible evidence has been presented that suggests Google engineers program the company\u2019s search, video or news algorithms to favor one political ideology over another,\u201d Axios\u2019 Sara Fischer writes.<\/p>\n