A district court in Allahabad has issued a notice to global search giant Google, its CEO and its India head for portraying Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a controversial search query. The query which became the topic of discussion back in June 2015, showed an image of PM Modi (among others) in search query for ‘top 10 criminals in the world.’
Additional District Judge (ADJ) Mahtab Ahmed issued a notice to Google’s CEO and its India head, on the behest of a complaint filed by advocate Sushil Kumar Mishra. The hearing for this particular case will be held on 31 August.
According to reports, Mishra had written to Google asking for a removal of the listing, but received no response. He even went to the police and couldn’t get his complaint registered following which he moved the court.
Earlier as a response to the entire issue, Google had put out an apology saying, “Sometimes, the way images are described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries. We apologise for any confusion or misunderstanding this has caused. We’re continually working to improve our algorithms to prevent unexpected results like this.”
The company had said that in this case, the image search results were drawn from multiple news articles with images of Modi, covering the prime minister’s statements with regard to politicians with criminal backgrounds, but added that the news articles do not link Modi to criminal activity, and the words just appeared in close proximity to each other.
