Google has clarified on the news stories published by several media outlets that the Google Images has been hijacked linking Pakistan flag to toilet paper.
“Google searches for ‘best toilet paper in the world’ appear to have been manipulated to return images of the Pakistan national flag,” BBC News reported.
In a statement to The News, the Google spokesperson said: “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,” he added.
“Since these news stories published, images from those articles are now ranking for this query, as the pages contain words relevant to the search.”
This is not the first time that a Google search has shown unusual results. In past US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were linked to some defaming results.
The BBC report added that the flag-toilet paper connection emerged soon after the 14 February attack in a few blogs commenting on the Pulwama attack and became a trending topic on social media over the weekend.
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