Google chief executive Sundar Pichai testified Tuesday before the US House Judiciary Committee in a hearing about privacy and data collection.
The Washington Post reports that, in an effort to understand how Google search algorithms work, a Democratic congresswoman asked the tech company’s chief executive a simple question: “If you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. How would that happen? How does search work so that that would occur?”
Pichai tried to explain to the room full of mostly tech novices how the algorithms take into account some 200 factors — such as relevance, popularity, how others are using the search term — to determine how to best match a query with results.
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