Explained: Why Google showed Kannada as the ugliest language of India

New Delhi, June 04: Kannada as answer to a query in Google on ugliest language in India sparked an outrage on Thursday and the Karnataka government said it would issue a legal notice to the tech leader, while that reply appeared to be a gaffe.

With people expressing their indignation and leaders cutting across party lines slamming Google, it quickly removed Kannada "as the ugliest language in India" and apologised to the people saying the search result did not reflect its opinion.

Karnataka Minister for Kannada, Culture and Forest, Aravind Limbavali told reporters that a legal notice would be served to Google for showing such an answer to that question.

Later, he took to Twitter to express his outrage and demanded an apology from Google to Kannada and Kannadigas.

So, what exactly happened. The search results on Google are based on algorithms and keywords for websites and online content. The algorithm looks across the internet for websites and articles when a user enters their query. This is known as search engine optimisation. The culprit are the sites which may have written the content based on these lines and used keywords.

In December 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had told US Congress that the company had little control over the search results after it showed Donald Trump's images when users searched for the word 'idiot."

He said that the search results are based on Google search indexes, webpages and keywords, images attached to those pages.

When contacted, a Google spokesperson told PTI, "search isn't always perfect. Sometimes, the way content is described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries." "We know this is not ideal, but we take swift corrective action when we are made aware of an issue and are continually working to improve our algorithms. Naturally, these are not reflective of the opinions of Google, and we apologise for the misunderstanding and hurting any sentiments."