Google’s Congress hearing: Sundar Pichai’s answers on censorship, internal bias, and more

“Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained how his search engine results are not influenced by internal opinions, and pledged his commitment to transparency”

After Facebook and Twitter, Google became the latest technology giant to appear at the US Capitol Hill and submit itself to questioning at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai took the hot seat to answer a swath of questions pertaining to allegations of internal bias affecting search results, and projects that do not comply with Silicon Valley’s moral notion of right to information and free speech.

As a result, Pichai faced a lengthy set of questions regarding the company’s internet search policies, how certain results are brought forward, as well as a crucial bit of decision pertaining to China. Answering early on about questions of internal bias affecting Google’s search engine results, Pichai reaffirmed how they are not at all affected by the whims and opinions of individuals. The example of this concern was brought forward by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who brought up how searching for the word ‘idiot’ on Google returned image search results of US President Donald Trump, and whether this was a case of intentional bias from the company.

In response, Pichai offered a long, but concise explanation of how a search engine works, stating, “Any time you type in a keyword, as Google we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of 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.“

He further affirmed that there is no manual intervention in this process. In a separate question, he also affirmed that a lone individual does not have any power to modify or affect a general search result. While this did sound aptly convincing, what has appeared to be a bit more complicated is Google’s internal work with Project Dragonfly. It is reportedly an ongoing internal project that aims to create a working model of a censored search engine for a market such as China. The project has been worked on for a while, and Pichai even revealed that at one point, there were a total of 100 people working on it.

Project Dragonfly has invited widespread criticism everywhere, including employee protests and resignations. A search engine of its nature, which complies with the Chinese totalitarian manner of censored information and public surveillance, goes completely against Google’s (and Silicon Valley’s) ideals of free speech, and was one of the reasons why Google withdrew its product from China back in 2010. The Project Dragonfly product would also require user’s phone numbers to be tied to their searches, thereby pretty much destroying any semblance of privacy.

With Rep. Kevin McCarthy bringing this up, Pichai said, “We have no plans to launch in China. We don’t have a search product there. Our core mission is to provide users access to information, and getting access to information is an important human right, so we are always compelled across the world to try hard to provide that information. But right now there are no plans to launch search in China. I’m committed to being fully transparent, including with policymakers, to the extent we ever develop plans to do that.“

While Pichai’s answers have been deemed as seemingly satisfactory for now, Google does have plenty of work to do, especially around further promoting transparency and neutrality in its operations.

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