Trump vs Google: Firm replies US President’s rigging allegation

Google on Tuesday rejected President Donald Trump’s allegation that its search engines are rigged.

The US President had pointedly accused Google of bias, stating that mostly negative stories about him come up when his name is searched.

He tweeted: “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media.”

“In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me and others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent.

“Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96 per cent of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous.

“Google and others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.

“They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation – will be addressed!” Trump added.

As of Wednesday morning, the tweets have generated over 55,000 comments with most respondents condemning the president’s claim.

Reacting, Google declared that it does not control search results.

A statement released by the firm read: “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds.

“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” Efe quoted Google as saying in a statement.

“Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries.

“We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”