The latest buzz is that Google throws pictures of US president Donald Trump on the term idiot in image search results.
The word Idiot is being Googled now for more than a million times and also the number one searched word in the USA. You may wonder why?
A congressional grilling session with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai took place, in which Pichai had to explain the link between idiot and Trump.
Pichai was further asked if the act was intentional and politically manipulated move. However, Pichai clearly denied and explained the reason behind it.
Google doesn’t run by one little man behind the curtains deciding what to show the users. Google has crawled and stored billion of website pages in the index and when a keyword is typed in the search box, the word is matched against the stored pages and rank them based on more than 200 signals, some of which are relevance, popularity, newness, how people are searching it. Based on which, the best results for the query are obtained. Further, the results are evaluated by external rankers to make sure the process is functioning. Pichai made it clear that there is no manual intervention with any of the search results.
The term ‘Idiot’ had, apparently, surfaced the internet with the pictures of President Trump in early 2018. Some believe the British protestors attempted to push Green Day’s song American Idiot to the top charts when Trump was to fly down in the UK for a Presidential visit.
Users across Reddit had posts with Trump touted as Idiot, which manipulated the search database. This tactic is also called Google bombing. However, Trump is not the first US President to be attached to a tag. In 2003, the term "miserable failure" popped pictures of President George W Bush.