Just Saying | Google search makes Trump the world’s top idiot, but is it fair?
- Yonden Lhatoo is both amused and intrigued by Americans’ obsession with the word ‘idiot’ in the context of their 45th president, which is pitting politics against technology
There’s a song that I just can’t get out of my head these days. It’s Green Day’s 2004 hit, American Idiot.
More than it being a great rock anthem that brings back fond memories of misspent youth, it’s because of Americans’ obsession with the word “idiot” in the context of their 45th president.
At the moment, it’s the most searched-for term in the United States, according to Google Trends. And people have looked it up online well over a million times since lawmakers at a congressional hearing this week demanded to know why typing “idiot” into Google’s image search would throw up a gallery of pictures of US President Donald Trump.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai was in for a grilling by Republicans suggesting it was a liberal conspiracy to ridicule Trump as part of what they perceive to be an anti-conservative bias built into the internet giant’s search engine.
Pichai explained that it was all about algorithms, and matching queries with billions of indexed pages – every time a keyword was typed in, results would be ranked according to hundreds of factors such as “relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it”.
Google got off pretty easy at the hearing, mostly due to its inquisitors’ technological illiteracy, evidenced by questions such as: “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?”