When you type in "Idiot" in Google search, photos
of US president Donald Trump comes up and Republicans in the US Congress
grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai about this.
Republicans allege that Google's search results are biased
and that Democrats who work at Google choose liberal websites over conservative
views for prime placement on Google services like Google search.
Several Republicans on the committee, including Rep. Lamar
Smith, said there was "political bias baked into" Google's culture.
Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren gave Google CEO a chance to
explain and convince them that there's no conservative bias in Google.
Lofgren said to Pichai:
Manipulation of search results - I think it's important to
talk about how search works. 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? How does search work so that that
would occur?
Pichai replied:
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.
Lofgren added:
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.
And Pichai replied:
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.
