A district court has issued a notices to global search giant Google, its CEO and its India head for portraying Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a search query. While hearing a complaint filed by advocate Sushil Kumar Mishra, the court ordered that a criminal complaint case be registered against the global search engine and its top officials.
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The Court’s direction comes after a complaint filed by an advocate. The next hearing on the case is scheduled for August 31.
The issue came to light around June previous year when users found Narendra Modi’s photo in Google image search result for “top criminals in the world”. As per Gupta, he had already written to Google asking it to remove Modi’s name but was not given any response, because of which he filed an application before the chief judicial magistrate previous year. He also approached the local police regarding the matter. His application was also dismissed by the chief judicial magistrate in November past year. But this did not deter Gupta who challenged CJM’s order and went on to file a revision application which was passed by the court.
Sometimes, the way images are described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries, Google added. “We’re continually working to improve our algorithms to prevent unexpected results like this”. However Google apologised for the misunderstanding created by its search engine, the image continued to appear for the particular search.
The search giant is already fighting multiple cases across the world for cases such as “abuse of monopoly”.
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This was the first (and in all probability not the last) incident where Google’s search has misunderstood things.
