Dem lawmaker asks Google CEO why Trump’s photo shows up when she searches for ‘idiot’

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to explain during a congressional hearing Tuesday why photos of President Trump appear when people type the word “idiot” into the company’s search engine.

“Right now, if you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) during a House Judiciary Committee hearing with Pichai.

Pichai sought to explain the workings behind Google’s search engine and to deny that the company was manipulating search results.

{mosads}“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword… we have gone out and stored copies of billions of pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” he said in response

“Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query.”

Lofgren responded by jokingly asking: “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user? It’s basically a compilation of what users are generating.”

The Guardian published a story in July that said online activists angry with Trump’s policies have been manipulating the search results for Google Images to ensure pictures of Trump appear as the top search results for the term “idiot.”

Pichai was invited to testify before Congress to address allegations of political bias from conservatives. They claim that Google and other tech giants discriminate against conservative voices, allegations which are widely dismissed by tech experts and vehemently denied by Silicon Valley.