Internal memo from Google's CEO insists search results are free from political bias

Google chief Sundar Pichai wants the people working for him to understand this clearly: Google's search results aren't influenced by political bias.

That's the message Pichai focused on sending in a Friday email to all employees. He was responding to reports of a January 2017 email chain that started a few days after Donald Trump instituted his first version of the Muslim ban.

A Thursday report from the Wall Street Journal noted that, in early 2017, employees talked about using Google's search features to respond to Trump's controversial travel ban that focused on predominantly Muslim countries. They sought a way to push back against "islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc." and "prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc." Read more...