Google CEO explains why 'idiot' word search throws out images of Donald Trump

Google's CEO Sundar Pichai  has been put in the hot seat recently, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in US on the issue of data and privacy protection.  One question posed to Pichai on Google search algorithms was posed by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California who questioned Pichai why the search for the word "idiot" churned out images of US President Donald Trump.In response to that, Pichai said that at Google, the team has "gone out and crawled and stored" copies of billions of webpages in its index. It takes the keyword and match it against webpages, in rank based on over 200 signals such as relevance, freshness, popularity and how other people are using it."Based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best results for that query. 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," he added. Meanwhile, Lofgren clarified the response by saying that it is "not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what to show the user" and that the search is a compilation of what users are generating, and sorting through that information.Pichai added that the team does not manually intervene on any particular search result. He added that it was simply not possible for a single person or even a group for that matter to manipulate results due to the numerous steps that have been put in place.“Last year we served over three trillion searches. Just as a fact, every single day, 15% of the searches Google sees, we have never seen them before. So this is working at scale," he said. The question on search algorithms sprung up following the Republicans' allegations that Google employees manipulate results for political reasons.