ISLAMABAD – A recent statement by Google’s spokesperson clarified that theabnormal search results against the search query, ‘the best toilet paper inthe world’ were not due to Google’s search ranking.
To put things into perspective, following the aftermath of ‘Palawan Attack’a plethora of political and cyber attacks have come towards Pakistan. Themost recent attack seems to have hacked 200 Pakistani websites. However,another insulting act from across the border has come in the form of achange in Google’s search result. On entering the above-mentioned searchquery in Google search, the search returns with images of Pakistan’s flag.
[image: BBC – Toilet Paper]
The timing of this anomaly seems more than a coincidence since theabove-mentioned search query did not return the same results prior to the‘Palawan attack’. Google in response to these unusual results clarifiedthat there was no evidence that Google search was ranking Pakistani flag asa search result to the above-mentioned query.
“While we continue to investigate the matter, we have not found anyevidence that Google Images was ranking the Pakistani flag in response tothis particular search,” said a Google spokesperson.
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The main reason why the search result is being shown in such a way is thatmany news outlets and meme pages on Facebook and Twitter have been postingshameful and baseless articles, image and memes about Pakistan, as areaction to the baseless allegation made by the Indian government thatPakistan is behind the recent ‘Palawan Attack’.
“Since these news stories (have been) published, images from those articlesare now ranking for this query, as the pages contain words relevant to thesearch,” the Google spokesperson added.
As you can see from the released statement, it was a rather dirty trickfrom the Indian media and social media pages and not an actual change inGoogle’s search was ranking Pakistan’s flag as a result to this output. Itshould be noted that this isn’t the first time such an anomaly in Google’ssearch has happened. Previously, Google searched have shown unusual resultson President Donald Trump and India’s Prime Minister Modi.
