After Donald Trumps’s Image Result Of ‘Idiot’, Sonia Gandhi Came Up At First Rank On Google Search As ‘Bar Girl In India’

Jyotis - Dec 20, 2018

Is that true Google is manipulating what comes up on its search engine?

Google Search is clearly an efficient engine; however, the results it offers to users are not always ‘smart.’ The first evidence is the incident of the US President, Donald Trumps which has just come into the public in recent times.

This time, the victim is a celebrity from India. It is Sonia Gandhi with the keyword “bar girl in India” on the two search pages including Google.co.in and Google.com. Born in Italy, in 1946, she was married to Rajiv Gandhi, the 6^th Prime Minister of India and then, took over as the president of the Indian National Congress in 19 years.

Back to the Google search engine, all the Indians must be shocked by realizing that the name ‘Sonia Gandhi’ is set as the first result when they Google search the term “bar girl in India” or "Italian bar girls." The displayed content is the Wikipedia page concerning her biography.

In addition to the first result, her name also appears in a series of different results in the next pages. We can even find some kinds of articles or forum posts in suspicion of the authenticity of her being a bar dancer. Is that a real rumor or a political attack? Is that true Google is manipulating what comes up on its search engine?

Also on December 2018, in the US congressional hearing, Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO, had to explain why the images of Donald Trump shows up when users search for the keyword “idiot.” In another incident, Punjab Assembly in Pakistan asked for Google’s explanation concerning the relationship between their Prime Minister Imran Khan and “bhikari”.

Responding to the US senator in the above hearing, Pichai said that the company hasn’t manipulated Google search results which show up based on what is found online by web crawlers. Among the massive amount of pages available on Google, it only ranks and offers results from more than first 200 signals. For each query, the best results can hail from one of the following factors: popularity, freshness, how users are exploiting it, or relevance.