Google versus Congress: Data collection, China and why it thinks Trump is an 'idiot'
Friday, 14 December 2018
OPINION: It's where over 90 per cent of internet searches take place. If you're looking to find information online, Google is where you go.
And with great power, comes great responsibility. Supposedly. But not for Google. It's a business that isn't influenced, or heavily regulated, by any government where it currently operates.
So, understandably, all eyes were on Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, this week as he faced US Congress to answer questions regarding how the search engine operates.
Amazingly, this is the first time the CEO has formally answered questions from the US Government. Data collection, political bias and China were all on the ticket. Evocative issues in the current relationship between technology and modern politics.
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The hearing lasted three-and-a-half hours - ample time to get major insight into how Google operates.
And, despite members of Congress sometimes sounding like confused grandparents when asking questions about The Google, progress was made.
If you Google the word idiot, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. So, as usual with US politics, Donald Trump grabbed all of the headlines, despite having nothing to do with the hearing.
That honour fell to the Democrat Representative, Zoe Lofgren, after she announced 'if you Google the word idiot, a picture of Donald Trump comes up'.
Sundar Pichai, to his great credit, managed to give a full explanation about how search results are displayed, without the hint of a smile or laugh at the topic.
'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.'
This prompted a (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek response from Lofgren 'so it's not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we're going to show the user?'.
It's not.
Ironically, if you were to Google 'idiot' today, news stories about Google displaying a picture of Donald Trump next to the search term 'idiot' now rank. Which proves the CEO's point for him. The results are the direct product of an algorithm that, like Pichai says above, monitors over 200 ranking features.
The specifics of these features aren't published anywhere by Google, but SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) experts have a good idea of what they are. And Google search results, like any algorithm, are susceptible to abuse and manipulation.
For context, Donald Trump's name appeared in the search results for 'idiot' because the Green Day song American Idiot was the soundtrack to the anti-Trump protests that took place in London earlier this year.
Following the protests, a picture of Trump on Reddit, with the title 'idiot' got upvoted. A lot. Thus triggering Google's search signal for content popularity.
The concerted effort to win a search term is known as a 'Google Bomb'. This Trump/idiot Google Bomb wasn't the first, and it won't be the last.
In 2010 a group of French bloggers Google Bombed the phrase 'trou du cul du web' (French for 'The Asshole of the Internet') with a picture of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Facebook profile. Similarly, searching 'buffone' (Italian for 'clown') in 2005, Google would return a picture of Former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi.
In short, it's not a pleasant or robust feature of Google's search algorithm. But, nor is it a new. Or a sign of political bias.
In a prepared statement, Pichai gave further clarity to the allegations of bias. 'I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way. To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests. We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions and we have no shortage of them among our own employees.'
GOOGLE'S PLANS IN CHINA
Project Dragon, Google's secretive codename for a search engine that works with China's censored version of the internet, was also on the agenda. And the hearing produced the most concrete evidence from Google regarding the project to date.
'Right now, we have no plans to launch in China, we don't have a search product there' Pichai stated. But with the next breath, he continued 'our core mission is to provide users access to information, and getting access to information is an important human right'.
Which seems contradictory. And unclear.
China is unlikely to budge with its censored version of the internet. Which means the only way Google could possibly work in China, would be by crawling and displaying search results from the censored Chinese webpages available to it.
Frustratingly, Pichai refused to state whether the project was currently active. But did confirm there have been 'over 100 people working on it' within Google.
Expect this subject to roll on for months/years to come.
DATA COLLECTION
The most positive news, for digital privacy crusaders, came after numerous officials asked questions regarding how much, and what sort, of data, Google collects about its users via mobile platforms.
When Congressman Ted Poe asked a direct 'yes or no' question to whether Google could tell if a Congressman moved from one side of the room to the other, Pichai refused to reply with the binary answer requested.
Instead, he said was unsure and explained users can select which data they allow Google to collect via a device's setting. But conceded it can be complicated.
'We want to simplify it,' Pichai said referring to data collection. 'I do think we can do better.'