A Congresswoman asked Sundar Pichai (Google CEO) how Donald Trump’s picture appears in the search results when you google search the word “Idiot”. She was concerned that there was a “little man” behind the curtain deciding to send back results of Trump when the word “idiot” is searched. Google does not have a “little man” deciding what images get returned when a user searches for key terms, and they do not have board meetings discussing what should be returned. If they did, I think Yahoo would probably be the more popular search engine as Google would be an incredibly inefficient company, and there are bigger fish to fry. Instead they use technology to decide what gets returned.
A search engine crawls web pages, and stores billions of copies of them in their database. When you search something on google, it takes the string that was inputted, and matches against all of their pages, and rank them based on 200 different signals, such as popularity, relevance, and freshness. Based on all of the different signals, they try to rank and find the best search results.
There are a couple methods you can use to increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which will help your website increase its chances to appear in the front page of google. One way is to use alt tags in your images and videos that are being posted on your website. An alt tag is a way to give a text description of the image or video that is being displayed on a web page. Computers can read text, and having a text description on a certain image or video will help the search engines identify what the picture is about. Having a link worthy site will also help. Instead of having links in your website that say “Click Here for pictures of beautiful unicorns!”, you should have the links have a descriptive keyword that describes where the link is going to. For example, “Click here for beautiful unicorns!”, would be a much better way to link to all the wonderful unicorns. The phrase “Click Here” has no search engine value. This will help the rating of that particular page, as well as the page that you are linking to. Adding links like this also helps others that are visiting your website with a screen reader.
When you design your website, it will also be helpful to use metadata to your advantage. This allows you to insert information on the content of your web page. Adding keywords to your Title Metadata, which is the most important, as well as the description metadata. Doing so will help with your rankings as well. Using Alt tags, using descriptive links, and using Metadata are three ways to improve your search results on Google, or any other search engine. Now that the congresswoman asked that question to Sundar Pichai, it only strengthened the search results of Trump when searching google for the word “idiot”.