Google's CEO testifies why picture of Donald Trump comes up with image search for 'idiot'

Sundar Pichai told US lawmakers that employees are not able to influence the results it shows users.

Trump has previously accused Google of providing "rigged" search results with negative news about himself and fellow Republicans.

He appeared in 13 of the top 17 results and a picture of his sons, Donald and Eric, was at number six, USA Today reports.

But Mr Pichai refuted claims that the company's search results are politically biased.

"It is not possible for an individual employee to manipulate our search results," he told Congressman Lamar Smith.

He added: "I can commit to you, and I can assure you, we do it without regards to political ideology. Our algorithms have no notion of political sentiment in it.”

The Google boss said algorithms take into account around 200 factors such as how popular it is, its relevance, and how the search term is being used by others.

Concerns ranging from the usage of people's data, to a launch of a search engine in China, were raised in the grilling held by the US House Judiciary Committee.

Congressman Ted Lieu said: "If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things."

Mr Pichai, who has been at the helm of Google for three of his 15-year career with the company, also argued that it had "no plans" for a censored version of its search engine for China, but admitted up to one hundred people at Google were working on the idea.

He said: "We have developed and explored what search could look like if we launched in a country like China."

He added: "We have had the project under way for a while, and there have been other projects we have undertaken and never launched them too."

In September, Google failed to send Larry Page, chief executive of Google's parent company, Alphabet, to a US Senate intelligence committee looking into election meddling.

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey attended the hearing, but an empty chair for Google was left after the committee rejected an offer to receive a lower-ranking executive instead.

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