WASHINGTON – *“Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, apicture of Donald Trump comes up. How would that happen?”*
linkwas an interesting way to phrase the question, and Google executive did gointo the details of their search ranking algorithm, making it clear thatthe whole process was done automatically and there was no manualinteraction involved in creating search results.
*“Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawledand stored copies of billions of pages in our index. And we take thekeyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200signals — things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other peopleare using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and findthe best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them withexternal raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’show we make sure the process is working.”*
Sundar Pichai confirmed Lofgran’s initial observation that there was no“little man” sitting behind the scenes who was tinkering with results. Itis all an automated machine and it works on scale, making manual tinkeringalmost impossible.
Even now, if you go on Google and search for “idiot”, the results aremainly comprised of sites which are explaining why the term “idiot” returnsDonald Trump, thus effectively filling the images area with pictures ofPresident of the United States. It is believed that originally the wordidiot got associated with Donald Trump as a result of the phenomenon knownas “Google Bombing”, in which outside parties manipulate search results torank their results higher, usually motivated by political reasons.