Some would say that needs no explanation. Some would say the Google Search Engine is correct to show information about Donald Trump when someone searches the word, “idiot.” But in Congress, Republicans think something smells, and they’re not talking about the stench in the White House!
On Tuesday, the search engine giant’s CEO Sundar Pichai had the task of explaining to members of Congress why that happens during a hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
Pichai refuted Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s (D-Calif.) tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it was down to “a little man sitting behind the curtain” who was skewing the results against conservatives — saying the company doesn’t “manually intervene” in searches.
“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of their pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai explained.
“Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query,” he added, during the hearing that also threw up several other self-owns for lawmakers.
