Google 'bar girl in India' and Sonia Gandhi's images appear
Recently, Google received backlash from US lawmakers, after it came to light that when you search 'idiot' on its platform, images of the US President Donald Trump appear. Now, closer home, it was found that when you search 'bar girl in India' on Google, the Wikipedia page of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi emerges. Here we decode what possibly have gone wrong.
Gandhi worked as waitress at restaurant/bar in UK in mid-1960s
A simple search for 'Italian bar girl' or 'bar girl in India' throws up images and Wikipedia page of Gandhi. Gandhi, who is of Italian descent, worked at a restaurant/bar as a waitress in Cambridge, the UK, in the mid-1960s. She also met her late husband Rajiv Gandhi in that very restaurant and settled in India once they got married. The rest is history.
Many pages on Internet, Quora have information of Gandhi
The information about Gandhi's life in the UK, working as a waitress, can be seen in many pages on the Internet. Quora also has answers for entries that asked if Gandhi worked as a bar dancer or bar girl previously. Google's search algorithm probably picked the combination of the words- 'Italian', 'bar', 'girl', 'India' and gave up the skewed result. Oops!
Google CEO was asked why Googling 'idiot' returns Trump photos
Not so long ago, Google showed another skewed result by showing images of Trump whenever somebody searched 'idiot' on its platform. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was summoned by the US House Judiciary Committee for a hearing over the matter. Pichai was grilled, as the US lawmakers bombarded him with questions on Google's data practices, online privacy and political bias, among others.
Pichai explained Google search considers 200+ factors to return search-results
Democrat Zoe Logfren asked Pichai about the 'idiot' search issue. Pichai patiently explained that whenever someone searches for a word, Google rakes through information stored in billions of pages, matches the typed keyword against the pages, and results appear out of them. He asserted that Google is not politically biased, and the search algorithms take into account over 200 factors to return search results.
Google algorithm isn't immune to manipulation
While the Google search-engine may not be biased, it doesn't mean Google search results cannot be manipulated. A Guardian report said that some anonymous users on Reddit gamed the system by upvoting a post that included a picture of Trump and the word 'idiot'. The post received a huge volume of traffic, thus Google's search algorithm also started associating with the image and keyword.
In 2006, 'miserable failure' linked to George Bush, Michael Moore
Interestingly, the early cases of such distorted results on Internet go back to 1999, when Microsoft was equated to 'satan'. Also, in 2006, the words 'miserable failure' were somehow linked to former US President George W Bush and filmmaker Michael Moore. Notably, Gandhi's 'bar girl in India' results just didn't appear on Google search, but also on Microsoft's Bing search engine.
