在上周二美國眾議院的聽證會上，谷歌（Google）首席執行官桑德爾·皮查伊的證詞幾乎滴水不漏，但他可能并未回應為什么有人在搜索“白癡”時，美國總統唐納德·特朗普的照片會在搜索結果的前列出現。

皮查伊在眾議院司法委員會（House Judiciary Committee）的面前解釋道，公司不會“手動干預”搜索結果，這些結果都是基于對網頁內容的獲取。

皮查伊表示：“我們如今為您在任何時候輸入的關鍵詞提供搜索服務，我們谷歌公司已經在索引中獲取并儲存了數十億的網絡頁面副本。我們獲得關鍵詞，將其與網頁匹配，并根據超過200個信號對它們進行排序。”

他補充道：“相關性、新鮮度、流行度，以及其他人如何使用它，這些因素都有影響。以此為基礎，在任何給定的時間里，我們會嘗試為該查詢找到最佳的搜索結果。”

眾議院委員會舉辦此次聽證會，是為了探討谷歌的搜索結果是否存在政治傾向。在皮查伊對佐伊·洛夫格倫（加利福尼亞州-民主黨代表）的問題給出解釋之前不久，拉瑪爾·史密斯（得克薩斯州-共和黨代表）曾聲稱擁有“無可辯駁”的證據表明谷歌刻意打壓保守派的搜索結果。

根據以往記錄，“白癡”的搜索結果中出現大量特朗普的照片，是因為第三方對總統使用了“谷歌炸彈”。類似的情況曾在前美國總統喬治·W·布什的身上出現過。The Verge指出，2000年代中期，每當搜索“慘敗”的時候，都會出現布什的照片。（財富中文網）

譯者：嚴匡正

Perhaps lost amid Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s relatively unscathed testimony to Congress on last Tuesday were questions about when someone searches for the word “Idiot,” photos of President Donald Trump appear high in the results.

Speaking in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Pichai explained that the company doesn’t “manually intervene” in search results, and instead search results are based on crawling the content of web pages.

“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of their pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai said.

“Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query,” he added.

The House committee held the hearing to discuss whether Google’s search results are politically slanted. Shortly before Pichai’s explanation, which was prompted by a question from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) had claimed to have “irrefutable” evidence that Google was suppressing conservative search results.

For the record, that “idiot” search result page was due to third-parties’ “Google bombing” the president. Something similar was done to President George W. Bush. In the mid-2000s, Bush’s photo showed up whenever you searched for “miserable failure,” The Verge notes.