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Google asked to explain why search for ‘idiot’ brings up Donald Trump’s pictures

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Google asked to explain why search for ‘idiot’ brings up Donald Trump’s pictures

The word “idiot” quickly became the most searched term on Google after Republican congresswoman Zoe Lofgren pointed out that results from the search reveals pictures of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Lofgren posed the question to Google CEO Sundar Pichai during a congressional hearing on Tuesday about potential bias among the website’s searches.

“If you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that. How would that happen?” she asked.

Read also: Australian govt probes Google, Facebook

Pichai replied by saying Google’s searches are based on multiple factors that determine the end result.

“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,” he testified. “Based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query.”

The word “idiot” was the most-searched term on Tuesday with more than one million searches, according to Google Trends.

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