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Republican grills Google CEO on why pictures of Donald Trump appear when you search the word ‘idiot’

Republican grills Google CEO on why pictures of Donald Trump appear when you search the word ‘idiot’

A Republican member of congress has grilled the CEO of Google about why when she Googles “idiot”, a picture of Donald Trump appears.

Zoe Lofgren quizzed Sundar Pichai as he gave a testimony to Congress on Tuesday.

In his response, Mr Pichai had to explain that this was not an intentional outcome.

Ms Lofgren said: “Right not, if you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up.

“I just did that, how would that happen?”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Commitee (Getty Images)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Commitee (Getty Images)

Mr Pichai offered Ms Lofgren a detailed explanation about the technicalities of Google and how searches work in tandem with key words.

He said: “Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai will be grilled by US lawmakers (AFP/Getty Images)
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai will be grilled by US lawmakers (AFP/Getty Images)

“And we take the keyword and match it against their pages 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 search results for that query.”

Ms Lofgren replied: “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the users?”

Donald Trump appears as the first images when you type 'idiot' into Google (AP)
Donald Trump appears as the first images when you type 'idiot' into Google (AP)

Mr Pichai faces questions from US lawmakers on a range of topics, including data breaches and censorship.

House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy said Google had to testify because of the “widening gap of distrust” between tech companies and American people.