Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared before the House Judiciary Committee this week to answer questions about his company’s work building a proprietary search product for China, data collection, and other matters of national security. But instead of discussing these highly relevant issues, Committee members turned their questioning into a massive display of ignorance for the basics of search technology and algorithms.
Pichai started out his testimony by telling the gathered Congressional representatives that Google is not a political company and that, “We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions—and we have no shortage of them among our own employees.”
That basic statement was not enough for GOP representatives who quickly proved that were more interested in scoring political points by accusing the search giant of harboring a bias against conservative politicians and ideas. The Republicans then went on to grill Pichai with questions like, “Why do pictures of Donald Trump appear when you Google the word ‘idiot?” and “Why do only negative stories appear when you Google healthcare topics?”.
One Congressman even wanted to know why his iPhone’s news feed had a “liberal bias”. Pichai pointed out that Google doesn’t make iPhones, the Congressman responded by suggesting that maybe it was an Android after all.
Mostly they just wanted to ferret out a perceived liberal bias in Google’s vaunted search algorithm.
Pichai did his best to explain the basics of search algorithms to the perpexled politicians, but his explanations never seemed to take. No matter how much he dumbed it down, Pichai could not convince the Committee members that a single person, or even a large group of people, could exert enough internal influence on Google’s 200 proprietary search factors to exert the kind of influence they were suggesting.
Democrats did their best to help Pichai out by using their allotted time to have him give their GOP counterparts, yet another, SEO lesson. This all came at the price of limiting discussions about more relevant matters like data privacy and censorship in China.
When he was finally asked point blank whether Google would work on a search engine that the Chinese government could use to suppress free speech and political discourse, Pichai skirted the issue by saying, “We have a stated mission of providing users with information, and so we always think it’s in our duty to explore possibilities to give users access to information,” Pichai said. “I have a commitment, but as I’ve said earlier on this, we’ll be very thoughtful and we’ll engage widely as we make progress”, according to Wired Magazine.