Why does Trump’s picture appear when one googles ‘idiot’?

Sundar Pichai had to explain to US Congress why President Donald Trump’s picture appears for image searches on Google with the keyword ‘idiot’.

Amid stifled laughter, the Google CEO gave a long explanation to the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing on Tuesday, trying to make it clear the search result was not a case of deliberate bias. The question came from Democrat lawmaker Zoe Lofgren. “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?,” she asked.

Pichai said: “Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of 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.

“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’s how we make sure the process is working.”

Lofgren had a follow-up question: “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?”

“This is working at scale, and we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result,” Pichai told her, as he fielded questions on manipulating search results and intentional political bias.

According to The Verge website, Trump isn’t the first president getting such results. “In the mid-2000s, searches for ‘miserable failure’ famously returned results about President George W Bush,” it said. AGENCIES

WASHINGTON: