VIDEO: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Testifies Before Congress

The House Judiciary Committee spent three-and-a-half hours on Tuesday grilling Google CEO Sundar Pichai. But instead of advancing public discourse on antitrust laws, consumer privacy, Big Tech’s role in our democracy and censorship in China, lawmakers languished in debate over whether Google is biased against conservatives.

GOP members accused the Mountain View firm of downplaying right-leaning websites in search rankings. Democrats used much of their time refuting those assertions.

And when he wasn’t correcting dumb misconceptions revealing the rudimentary knowledge many congress members still have about the tech industry, Pichai kept a straight face while answering even the most facetious lines of questioning.

Like a query from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose, which went viral.

“Right now,” she said, “if you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that. How would that happen?”

Pichai offered a lengthy, generalized explanation:

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.

“So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?” Lofgren replied sarcastically.

In related news, the word “idiot” was the most-searched word on Google today.

Watch the C-Span footage of the hearing below. 

Jennifer Wadsworth is the former news editor for San Jose Inside and Metro Silicon Valley. Follow her on Twitter at @jennwadsworth.

5 Comments

  1. Idiot: based on relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it… Yep, I’d say Google’s algorithms nailed it on that one. Oh, and nice one, Zoe!

    • It’s like the Clever Left has zero self-awareness. If you think the likes of Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai are going to usher in the Vanguard of the Final Ultimate Utopia, you really need to go sit and think alittle longer. Trump is a distraction and convenient punching bag, Google and Facebook are the end of the Republic, the final step toward complete oligarchy. We are a few steps away from it in CA now. Perhaps you have a seat on the ship, good for you, but don’t think these ubergeeks are anything but utilitarians and the brave new world they are creating will be a dystopian nightmare and the Clever Left, such as yourself, will be the first served manure pie.

  2. > Pichai kept a straight face while answering even the most facetious lines of questioning.

    Apparently, Pichai kept his face straightened while fibbing with zest and gusto into the clueless and perplexed face of Zoe Lofgren:

    https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/01/16/google-youtube-search-blacklist-smoking-gun/

    ‘THE SMOKING GUN’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Abortion, Maxine Waters, David Hogg

    ————————————-

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-16/google-manipulated-youtube-search-results-program-users-behavior

    ‘The manual (human) adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month. Pichai actually said that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.” A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”’

    Question for the San Jose City Council:

    Will San Jose be a better place with Sundar Pichal and 20,000 of his paid agents contributing their money, opinions, wish lists, and ethics to local politicians?

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