Google’s Chief executive Sundar Pichai went in front of US Congress to defend his company to lawmakers.
He faced questions about political bias and how the company uses personal data.Google chief denies political bias claims.
The word “idiot” has been searched for more than one million times, following testimony typing it into Google Images threw up pictures of President Trump.
The link between the two was mentioned during a congressional grilling of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai.
He was asked whether this was an example of political bias in algorithms, something he denied.
According to Google Trends, “idiot” is currently the number one most searched for term in the US.
Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren posed the question about why “idiot” highlighted results that included pictures of the president.
“How would that happen? How does search work so that would occur?” she asked.
Mr Pichai replied that Google search results were based on billions of keyword ranked according to more than 200 factors, including relevance and popularity.
“So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?” responded Ms Lofgren.
Republican members of congress continued to grill Mr Pichai, with Steve Chabot asking why, when he searched for news about his party’s health care bill, only negative news appeared.
Privacy protection
Republican committee member Lamar Smith said conservative voices were being “muted” via Google’s search results.
“Such actions pose a grave threat to our democratic form of government,” he said.
“This does not happen by accident, it is baked in to the algorithms.”
Mr Pichai said independent studies had not uncovered any bias and added that his business was “transparent” about the way its search results were generated.