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Journalism of Courage
Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared before the US Judiciary Committee as part of a Congressional hearing. The hearing titled, “Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices” saw Pichai answering questions from panel members for over three hours.
US Judiciary Committee members asked Pichai about the company’s plans for a separate search engine in China, allegations of bias against conservative sites and content, as well as the company’s privacy practices and whether it is tracking users. Here’s what we learnt from Pichai’s hearing.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced a number of questions regarding the company’s plans for a search engine dedicated to China. Earlier reports have said that Project DragonFly, as it is internally called, could see Google launch a censored version of its search engine in China, a market that the company left back in 2010.
“Right now, there are no plans for a search product in China. If we ever approach a decision like that, I will be fully transparent regarding this, including with policy makers,” Pichai said. Still Pichai did not fully deny that such a search engine could be introduced in the future.
He admitted during the course of the hearing that at one point over 100 engineers had worked on the internal project and it was something that was discussed within the company. “We have developed and looked at what search could look like. We’ve had the project underway for a while. At one point, we’ve had over 100 people working on it is my understanding,” Pichai said.
He also insisted that the company has seen that whenever they bring their search products to a market, there are benefits.
The company did not have any discussions with Chinese government officials regarding the launch of such a search engine product, according to Pichai’s official comments.
One of the questions for Sundar Pichai was why the picture of US President Donald Trump appears in image search results, when a user looked up the word ‘idiot’ on Google. The question was asked by Representative Zoe Lofgren, who also did a search during the hearing to illustrate.
Pichai explained how Google relies on several parameters, when a search result shows up, and it is not one factor that determines rankings.
“Any time you type in a keyword, we as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of web 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,” he said.
“And then we evaluate them with external raters, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines,” Pichai added.
He also pointed out that Google had over 3 trillion searches last year alone. “Just as fact, every single day, 15 per cent of searches Google sees, we have never seen them before. This is working at scale. We don’t manually intervene in search results,” he pointed out.
Coming to why Trump’s photos appear in the image results, he said that’s because people are Google-bombing the search engine, where websites game Google by linking search results in ways that some rank higher.
Pichai also faced a number of questions from Republicans over political bias, and whether there was an anti-conservative tilt in the way Google reflected results. He was asked whether the company had tried to get Latino voters to go out and vote, based on statements from a leaked email of Eliana Murillo, who is Google’s head of multicultural marketing.
Pichai denied that they tried to help Latino voters with polling. “We don’t engage in partisan activities,” he said.
“Providing users with high quality results is sacrosanct to us, its what makes business sense for us.” he said during the hearing.
“Users also look to us to provide accurate, trusted information. We work hard to ensure the integrity of our products, and we’ve put a number of checks and balances in place to ensure they continue to live up to our standards. I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way,” Pichai said in his opening remarks.
During his opening remarks, Pichai said that the company “supports federal privacy legislation and proposed a legislative framework for privacy earlier this year.” During the hearing, US Republican representative Ted Poe picked up his iPhone and asked Pichai if Google would track his movements, if he moved from where he was sitting.
“Not by default,” Pichai responded, though the Poe wanted a yes or no response from the Google CEO. “There maybe a Google service if you’ve opted into use,” Pichai added.
“It’s not a trick question! You make $100 million a year, you ought to be able to answer that question,” Poe said.
The Google CEO said he could not give a yes or no answer without seeing the phone. “I genuinely cannot know, unless I look at the phone,” he said.
Pichai faced questions on what content was allowed on the platform and how conspiracy videos, including those suggesting that Hillary Clinton was killing young girls, were allowed on the platform.
The Google CEO admitted that they had to do more work in this area. “This is an area we acknowledge there’s more work to be done…We have to look at it on a video-by-video basis, and we have clearly stated policies, so we’d have to look at whether a specific video violates those policies,” he was quoted as saying.
He pointed out that the company gets around 400 hours of video every minute on YouTube, but admitted it is their responsibility, when it comes to clearing the kind of content that it is allowed.
On content moderation, he said that YouTube has clear teams dedicated to this, who identify videos that violate guidelines of the company.
