Googling the term “Donald Trump office” results in a somewhat surprising search result.
Googling the term “Donald Trump office” will result in a somewhat surprising search result.
While the first term that comes up is “President of the United States since 2017,” and the third and fourth are first lady Melania Trump and White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway, respectively, the second is “Vladimir Putin - President of Russia since 2012.”
According to Gizmodo, “Tech reporter Mike Isaac speculates that the search results are a product of the two politicians coming up together so often, given the current scandals.”
However, the report also says that journalist Patrick Züst, who initially tweeted the find, speculates that perhaps, “Google’s AI knows something the rest of us don’t.”
In a webpage explaining how its search engine works, Google points to three sets of inputs--indexing through web crawlers, search rankings via algorithms, and useful responses for the user.
Trump’s name has been frequently linked with Putin’s. As such, Antony J. Blinken, former deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, has written in a recent New York Times op-ed that “Mr. Trump, wittingly or not, has aided and abetted Russia’s efforts every step along the way.”
The U.S. president, meanwhile, has denied any wrongdoing, telling NBC’s Lester Holt recently that he had “nothing to do with Russia. I have no investments in Russia. None whatsoever.”
Trump’s lawyers also released a letter saying that, based on the past ten years of his tax returns, he doesn’t have debts or income from Russian sources “with a few exceptions.”