I was tempted to google it myself and realise it is true. Lol! When you google the word, ‘idiot’, the photo of Donald Trump, the President of the United States will appear. This is why the US Congress has invited the CEO Google, Sundar Pichai to explain why it is so.
The Republicans in the Congress accused Google of being biased and wondered whether there are Democrats who work with Google that influence the search results.
But, Pichai explained:
We provide search today for – anytime you type in a keyword, we as Google, we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of webpages in our index. We take the keyword and match it against webpages 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 results for that query. Then we evaluate them with external raters to make sure, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines, and that’s how we make sure the process is working.
The question continued:
So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user – it’s basically a compilation of what users are generating, and trying to sort through that information.
Pichai answered:
Last year we served over 3 trillion searches. Just as a fact, every single day, 15%of the searches Google sees, we have never seen them before. So this is working at scale. We don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.
