A bug that affects only India users.
By Dileep Thekkethil
A simple Google Maps search with the term “antinational” now takes users directly to the page of one of India’s most prestigious universities, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Delhi.
According to a clarification by Google, the bizarre result is caused by a bug in Google algorithm that uses word association.
Google’s statement seems to be right as a search for the word “sedition” and “patriotism” also came up with the Google Maps page that had JNU’s main gate and the location finder.
Reports also claim that search for the words “freedom of expression”, “Kanhaiya Kumar”, and “Smriti Irani” also returned the same result.
While investigating the possible reason for the bug, The American Bazaar found that most of the recent reviews for the JNU has keywords “antinational”, “kanhayia kumar” and “smriti irani” in it and this could have acted as a deceiving signal for Google’s robot.
JNU has been in the news after its student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested along with two other students after pro Afzal Guru and anti-India slogans were reportedly raised inside the campus.
A Google spokesperson told the Times of India “This is a Bug. Google Maps results take signals from many points on the web – including news outlets.”
According to him, keywords “antinational”, “kanhaiya kumar” and “jnu”” have been in the news for over a month and they are closely associated not only with the general Google web search but also in Maps, which is the reason for such a result.
He also added that the bug in the Google Maps will be fixed soon and the engineers have started working on it.
The American Bazaar has also come to know that users searching for the same keyword from outside India are not directed to JNU’s Google Map page, which means the bug only shows up in India.
It seems like the heated online discussion on the JNU issue and the new reviews that were posted on JNU’s page in Google Maps could have added more meta information prompting Google bot to link certain keywords to JNU so that search will be made easy for users from India.
This is not the first time that Google is courting trouble because of widely used meta keywords. Last year, there was a huge uproar after a search for “Top 10 Criminals” in Google image displayed the photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Back then Google had apologised saying that the meta description of the image forced its algorithm to return such a result. Even now the image of Modi appears in the search but Google has added a disclaimer saying: “These results don’t reflect Google’s opinion or our beliefs; our algorithms automatically matched the query to web pages with these images.”