Fronting a controversy after a Google Search with the keywords “ugliest language in India” showed “Kannada” in the results, Google India said that it is not the reflection of the company, as it apologized for the misunderstanding and hurting any emotions.
Google attracted an enormous backlash in the country recently after it showed Kannada, a language especially spoken in the southwest part of India, as the answer to the search examination “ugliest languages”.
Kannada language speakers hit the search engine giant for insulting the historically meaningful language, which dates back over 2,000 years. According to the picture 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 Karnataka government also denounced this on Thursday and warned of appropriate action against Google. “This is a very condemnable thing. If Google or anyone else behaves in contempt of Kannada language or insults Kannada, appropriate action will be taken against them,” said Arvind Limbawali, minister for forest, Kannada, and culture in Karnataka.
Arvind Limbawali also said that “the secretary of the department has been briefed about the matter and has been instructed to issue a notice to Google immediately.”
Meanwhile, the tech giant has deleted the response and apologized, saying the search results weren’t always perfect. Google also said that the concerned team takes swift corrective action when it is made aware of the issue.
It also said that it is working to continuously enhance the algorithms and “does not reflect the opinions of Google.”
What exactly happened?
The search results on Google are algorithm-based and depend on keywords for websites and their online content. When a user enters their query, the algorithm peeks across the internet for websites and articles that have related keywords and makes the result that it thinks is the best fit.
This is generally known as search engine optimization or SEO. Hence, professionals say that the real culprits here are sites that may have written content based on these lines and used the keywords.