Source: Taylor Hill / Getty On Tuesday, the CEO for Google, Sundar Pichai, found himself in an awkward situation when he had to explain Trump’s association with one particular word. According to The Verge, Pichai was being questioned at a House Judiciary Committee hearing where Congress people were trying to decide if Google manipulated search results based on political bias. When Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) stepped up to question Pichai, she wondered why pictures of Donald Trump were the first to show up when the word “idiot” was typed in Google image. “Right now, if you google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that,” she said. “How would that happen?” Uuuum… Pichai was ready for Rep. Lofgren. He put forth a general explanation of how Google search engines work: “Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of [websites’] pages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against their pages and rank them based on over 200 signals — things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines. And that’s how we make sure the process is working” Any further questions Lofgren??? Luckily, Lofgren was on Pichai’s side and was trying to refute the idea that Google’s search engine was politically motivated. She followed up with another question… “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?” Lofgren asked sarcastically. Pichai replied, “This is working at scale, and we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.” News outlets peeped the “idiot” Trump results earlier this year. They revealed that certain outside parties have something to do with Google’s search results. According to The Guardian, one reason Trump’s face is associated with the word “idiot” is because protesters used Green Day‘s “American Idiot” song to soundtrack Trump’s trip to London. There’s also been an intentional campaign to associate Trump’s picture with the word by manipulating Google’s algorithms. A lot of this involved people up-voting a Reddit post containing a photo of him and the word “idiot.” Such tactics are known as “Google bombing.” Trump isn’t the first to get Google-bombed either. According The Verge, in the mid-2000s, searches for “miserable failure” notoriously returned results about President George W. Bush. So whether it’s Google bombers or natural Google algorithms, the word “idiot” and Trump can’t help but be linked together. What are ya gonna do. With that being said, we thought we’d share some other words that seem to result in Trump’s face if you Google them. Hit the next pages to find out what they are. Remember… Google did it, not us.
