Google shows images as per one's popularity: Pichai on 'idiot' and Trump controversy

Google Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai here on Tuesday said that any results shown by search engines are based on stored copies of billions of keywords ranked according to more than 200 factors such as relevance and popularity.

According to The Hill, the Google CEO during a session of the United States Congress was asked by Democrat Representative Zoe Lofgren to explain the reason why pictures of President Donald Trump appear on the Google Images when someone types the word 'idiot' in the search engine.

"Right now, if you Google the word 'idiot' under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that," asked Lofgren.

Pichai responded, "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."

"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," Pichai added.

Congresswoman Lofgren responded to the reply of Pichai by 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 Google CEO was asked to attend the Congressional hearing over allegations from the conservatives that Google and other tech giants have biased and discriminatory policies.

Earlier in July this year British newspaper The Guardian rolled out a story over the people who cite differences with the policies of President Trump have started to influence the Google search engine results, making sure that President Trump's images appear when searched for the term 'idiot.