Google CEO Sundar Pichai was forced to explain why searches for the word "idiot" result in images of President Donald Trump to a U.S. congressional panel this morning.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Pichai answered questions on privacy, the future of a Chinese site and competitive dominance, as well as Rep. Zoe Lofgren's (D-CA) questions on Trump and alleged conservative bias.
"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?," Lofgren asked.
"We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword… we have gone out and stored copies of billions of web pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals," Pichai replied. "Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external radars, to objective guidelines, to make sure the process is working…"
Lofgren then followed up by asking if there was "a little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we are going to show the users."
"Last year we served over three trillion searches. Just as a fact, every single day, 15 percent of the searches Google sees, we have never seen them before," Pichai said. "So this is working at scale. We don't manually intervene on any particular search result."
Several Republicans during the hearing, including Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), accused Google's culture of exhibiting "political bias."
Congressman Steve Chabot (R-OH) said he didn't believe the algorithm excuse, citing an example of how he needed to click across to the third or fourth page on the search engine in order to discover sites not critical of a bill introduced in 2017 designed to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
"You had to go deep into the search results," Chabot said. "I know Google's attitude, 'The algorithm made us do it,' but I don't know that I buy that."
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