Google is also unreliable on the question of whether it is a reliable source of information. Nor did it mention that most Google services are widely blocked from China’s internet.

The box made no mention of a cyberattack that the company had cited as an immediate reason to stop running its search engine in China. “Sometimes, the way content is described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries.”Įarlier this year, a search for why Google was banned from China returned a fact box - garnered from a nationalist state-run tabloid, The Global Times - noting that Google had left the country of its own accord after deciding that Chinese laws did not “conform with its so-called democratic values.” “Search isn’t always perfect,” Google India said in its apology on Thursday. But it also admits that they sometimes get the facts wrong - or stray into the realm of opinion. The company has said that featured snippets work well, based on usage statistics and evaluations from people paid to evaluate the quality of its search engine’s results. They appear above the links that usually pop up in Google search results. The boxes, known as “ featured snippets,” contain information that the company’s algorithms pull from third-party sources. The episode illustrates the fallibility of the fact boxes, a function that Google created seven years ago.

By Friday, the top results for the search “What’s the world’s ugliest language?” were articles about Google’s apology for having answered it. Limbavali and other members of the state’s conservative political brass - had already been picked up by major Indian news outlets.

Google apologized on Thursday for “the misunderstanding and hurting any sentiments.” It also deleted the fact box about Kannada.īut its faux pas - and the response from Mr.

Google indic kannada