Google was at the receiving end of a social media backlash after its search engine showed Kannada as the ugliest language in India. Karnataka government also slammed the tech giant for the gaffe and warned of appropriate action against the search engine.
Karnataka Minister for Kannada, Culture and Forest, Aravind Limbavali told reporters that a legal notice will be served to Google for showing such an answer. Later, he took to Twitter to express his outrage and demanded an apology from Google. Kannada language has a history of its own having come into existence as many as 2,500 years ago, the minister said and added that the language has been the pride of Kannadigas through the ages.
According to the image shared widely on social media, the answer to the question, “What is the ugliest language in India?” was Kannada. “The answer is Kannada spoken by around 40 million people in south India,” according to a screenshot of the search results. The tech giant deleted the response and apologised to the people saying the search result did not reflect its opinion.
Speaking to news agency PTI, a Google spokesperson said, “The 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.”
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The search results on Google are algorithm-based and depend on keywords for websites and their online content. So, when a user enters a particular query, the algorithm looks across the internet for websites and articles pops up results that have related keywords. Hence, the mischievous content could have been on these lines with the controversial keywords.
Former Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy also denounced the tech giant in a series of tweets for the outrageous answer to the language question. He sought to know why Google “behaves in an irresponsible manner” in terms of the language.
