Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that Google has absolutely no bias on their site, but he was at a loss to explain why when you search the word idiot, you get a picture of President Trump.
Google is no more biased than the alt-right or the New Black Panthers. We know from recently leaked emails that Google employees were looking for ways to shut down more conservative sites, yet Pinchai would have us believe that those emails don’t exist.
Try it for yourself right now. Punch in idiot on Google search and see what comes up.
“Now, manipulation of search results,” said Lofgren. “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, any time you type in a keyword we — as Google — we crawl, we’ve gone out and crawled and stored billions of copies of billions of pages in our index and we take the keyword and match it against webpages and rank them based on our two hundred 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. And 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 replied: “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the users, basically a compilation of what users are generating and trying to sort through that information.” Pichai replied: “Last year we server over three trillion searches and just as a fact, every single day fifteen percent of the searches Google sees, we have never seen them before. So this is working at scale so we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.”
Pichai did everything but answer the question and that search was definitely manipulated.