Former Google engineer claims Google CEO Sundar Pichai lied to Congress over search result manipulation

Google employees do intervene in some user searches, engineer claims, contradicting Pichai's evidence to Congress last year

A former Google software engineer has accused Google CEO Sundar Pichai of lying to the US Congress by saying that that Google doesn't "manually intervene on any particular search result".

In a blog post published on Medium, Mike Wacker, a former engineer at Google, described a number of events to claim that Google employees do intervene in some specific user searches in order to manipulate the results.

On 11 December 2018, Pichai was summoned to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee. In his testimony, Pichai was asked to explain why images of President Trump appeared when Google search for the term "idiot" is made. That particular question came from Representative Zoe Lofgren (California).

"I just did that. How would that happen? How does search work so that that would occur?" Lofgren asked.

We don't manually intervene on any particular search result

In his response, Sundar explained to Lofgren how Google search actually worked. Pichai said that Google search is an automated process and that the results that appear are based on page ranks, which are determined by things such as "relevance, freshness, popularity" and so on. Pichai also said that Google uses about 200 algorithms to rank search results.

"So it's not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we're going to show the user? It's basically a compilation of what users are generating and trying to sort through that information," Lofgren asked Pichai.

Pichai responded by saying: "We don't manually intervene on any particular search result."

Wacker, who was fired from Google last month for speaking out against 'outrage mobs', claimed that Pichai misled Lofgren and the House Judiciary Committee with his statements.

In his post, Wacker described how the Google-owned YouTube platform actively manipulates user search results.

Wacker cited the example of Slate writer April Glaser, who sent an email to YouTube in December last year to express her unhappiness over the results returned by YouTube when she searched for the term 'abortion'. According to Glaser, almost all the top search results for 'abortion' on YouTube were related to anti-abortion.

After Glaser raised the issue with YouTube, the platform changed its search results by removing anti-abortion videos from the results. Glaser also received a response from a YouTube spokesperson, who "stressed that the company is working to provide more credible news content from its search and discovery algorithms".

Wacker claims that Google uses an alternative algorithm that delivers alternative search results. The alternative algorithm can be manually triggered by using a special file named youtube_controversial_query_blacklist.

YouTube blacklists the normal search results in case a query matches an entry on that blacklist. The user is then presented with the alternative search results.

Wacker also gave examples of other terms included in YouTube blacklist. He claimed that during the 2018 US midterm elections, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was also added to the YouTube blacklist, which meant that users searching for the term "Maxine Waters" in YouTube were presented with alternative results.

Wacker says he is not sure if Pichai deliberately misled Congress, but he does believe that Pichai was likely aware of the blacklists prepared by YouTube staff.

According to Wacker, Google's senior vice president Ben Gomes, who reports directly to Pichai, had approved policy documents for one of those blacklists.