Key Points:
- Karnataka minister Aravind Limbavali demanded an apology and tweeted, “The Kannada language has a history of its own, having come into existence as many as 2,500 years ago. It has been the pride of Kannadigas all through these two-and-a-half millennia.”
- Google, though apologised for something which wasn’t its mistake, clarified that the search feature wasn’t always perfect, and that sometimes “the way content is described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries”.
On Thursday, Google saw quite some mouthful of hate coming towards it because of a Search that blew up the internet in India.
Google, when was searching an answer to a query of “Which is the Ugliest Language in India?” stopped at the South Indian language “Kannada”. This filled Twitter and Instagram with angry posts even saying that the platform did it to insult the pride of Kannadigas.
Google immediately apologised for hurting the sentiments of the native speakers and India in general after the results showed Kannada as the ugliest language after a search on the platform.
The Karnataka government lashed out at the Tech Giant and even threatened to take legal action for the same. An outrage was seen on the search result that came in from the South Indian Leaders and others.
Not considering the fact the Search Query itself made little sense and was quite absurd, people took their anger out on the Answerer instead of the Questioner.
Karnataka minister Aravind Limbavali demanded an apology from the tech company saying that this was an attempt by Google to insult the pride of Kannadigas [Kannada speakers].
“The Kannada language has a history of its own, having come into existence as many as 2,500 years ago. It has been the pride of Kannadigas all through these two-and-a-half millennia,” Mr Limbavali tweeted.
Google, though apologised for something which wasn’t its mistake, clarified that the search feature wasn’t always perfect, and that sometimes “the way content is described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries”.
“We know this is not ideal, but we take swift corrective action when we are made aware of an issue and are continually working to improve our algorithms,” the statement said.
“Naturally, these are not reflective of the opinions of Google, and we apologise for the misunderstanding and hurting any sentiments.”
HD Kumaraswamy, former chief minister of the state, in a thread of Tweets, said “not just Kannada, no language is bad, adding that abuse against languages is painful. Is it impossible for Google to curb such hatred against any language?” he asked.
Well, to answer the question of HD Kumaraswamy, Google can’t really control the content posted by websites.
Explaining in short what happened:
- Someone searched ‘WHICH IS THE UGLIEST LANGUAGE IN INDIA?”
- Google, which is a Search Engine and works on an algorithm where it finds answers to the questions based on what content it has, answered the question as “KANNADA”;
- After this, the South Indian States and overall India started blaming Google for ‘insulting the language’;
- Now, Google does not answer the Questions but, it looks across the internet for websites and articles that have related KEYWORDS and brings the result that it thinks is the best fit;
- This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO);
- So, by this we understand, it is the sites that may have written content based on these lines and used the keywords are at fault and NOT GOOGLE!
This wasn’t the first time that Google faced something like this and had to apologize for nothing. In 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told US Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren that how the company has little to no control over the search results after it showed Donald Trump’s images to a query related to the word “idiot.”
CEO Pichai explained that the results that are shown are based on Google search indexes, webpages and the keywords, images attached to those pages and are not of Google’s personal opinion.
