Google has clarified on the news about its image results showing the Pakistan flag for 'best toilet paper in the world' and said that there is no evidence that its search algorithms are showing this particular result to the query.
“While we continue to investigate the matter, we have not found any evidence that Google Images was ranking the Pakistani flag in response to this particular search. Many news outlets wrote about an old screenshot from a meme website that is inconsistent with our UI and dates back to 2017, and we have not seen any independent verification that these results ever appeared as depicted,” Google said in a statement.
“Since these news stories published, images from those articles are now ranking for this query, as the pages contain words relevant to the search,” it further said.
The search query 'best toilet paper in the world' and its results were trending in blogs and social media two days after the February 14 attack on CRPF convoy in Pulwama that killed 40 soldiers.
Screenshots of the search results showing the Pakistan flag for this query were shared widely on social media and didn't take long to go viral.
Google search has thrown up such unusual results previously as well. In the past, a search on the word 'idiot' showed results of US President Donald Trump. Similarly, Narendra Modi's pictures were shown in the search results for 'Top 10 criminals'.
