Trump Picture Is What Most People Want When They Search for ‘Idiot’
TEHRAN (Basirat): Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained to Rep. Zoe Lofgren who asked why she gets pictures of US President Donald Trump when she searches for the word idiot as something that people are associating with that word.
In a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Google
CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to explain why a Google image search for "idiot”
turned up pictures of Donald Trump — and whether that was a case of intentional
bias, according to the Verge.
The question came from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who was trying to refute the
idea that Google is politically manipulating search results. "Right now, if you
google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just
did that,” she said. "How would that happen?”
Pichai offered a long, general explanation of how Google search works:
Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and
stored copies of billions of (websites’) 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.
"So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re
going to show the user?” Lofgren asked sarcastically.
"This is working at scale, and we don’t manually intervene on any particular
search result,” replied Pichai.
News outlets reported on the Trump "idiot” results earlier this year. If you
search the term now, in fact, you’ll mostly get pictures from stories explaining
why it happened. It appeared to be the result of outside parties gaming Google’s
search results, a well-known tactic known as "Google bombing.”
Trump isn’t the first president to get Google-bombed: in the mid-2000s, searches
for "miserable failure” famously returned results about President George W.
Bush. It can be a politicized (or just funny) extension of normal search engine
optimization tactics
Source:Farsnews
