Google CEO Sundar Pichai has told a US congressional panel the reason why search for idiot brings up Trump in Google Images.
“How would that happen? How does search work so that that would occur?” Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren asked Pichai on Tuesday, local time.
Pichai responded by explaining that Google has a search algorithm that collates data from billions of web pages.
“Any time you type in a key word, we, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of… billions of [web] pages in our index and we take the key word and match it against the pages and rank them based on our 200 signals, things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it…
“Based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best results for that query and then we evaluate them with external radars… to objective guidelines.”
Advertisement“So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the users?”
Pichai said the company doesn’t manually intervene on any particular search result.
The Guardian reported recently that the search for idiot result is partly because the Green Day song American Idiot was used by protesters to soundtrack Trump’s trip to London.