This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Had To Explain To US Congress Why Googling 'Idiot' Shows Donald Trump

Google CEO Sundar Pichai refuted the suggestion that it was down to “a little man sitting behind the curtain” who was skewing the results against Conservatives.

Search for the term “idiot” on Google and several photographs of President Donald Trump will appear high in the image results.

On Tuesday, the search engine giant’s CEO Sundar Pichai had the task of explaining to members of Congress why that happens during a hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

Pichai refuted Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s (D-Calif.) tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it was down to “a little man sitting behind the curtain” who was skewing the results against conservatives — saying the company doesn’t “manually intervene” in searches.

“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of their pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai explained.

“Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query,” he added, during the hearing that also threw up several other self-owns for lawmakers.

Close
This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.