After showing Kannada, a language spoken primarily in India’s southwest, as the answer to the search query “ugliest languages,” Google received a massive backlash in the country.
Kannada speakers have slammed Google for insulting the historically significant language, which dates back over 2,000 years. Kannada was the answer to the question, “What is the ugliest language in India?” according to an image widely shared on social media. According to a screenshot of the search results, “the answer is Kannada, which is spoken by around 40 million people in south India.”
On Thursday, the Karnataka government condemned the incident and threatened Google with legal action. “This is a very bad thing to do. If Google or anyone else acts in a disrespectful or insulting manner toward Kannada, appropriate action will be taken against them “Karnataka’s minister for forest, Kannada, and culture, Arvind Limbawali, said as much.
Limbawali also stated that the department’s secretary has been briefed on the situation and has been instructed to issue a notice to Google as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, Google has removed the response and apologised, stating that search results aren’t always accurate.
So, what happened exactly?
Google’s search results are based on an algorithm that considers keywords for websites and their online content. When a user types in a search query, the algorithm searches the internet for websites and articles that contain related keywords and returns the best match.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the term for this. As a result, experts believe that the real criminals are websites that have written content based on these lines and used the keywords.
After showing Donald Trump’s images to a query related to the word “idiot,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told US Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren in December 2018 that the company has little to no control over the search results. Pichai explained that the search results are based on Google search indexes, webpages and keywords, and images attached to those pages during the House Judiciary Committee hearing.
