Google Image Search For “Completely Wrong” Turns Up Mitt Romney Pictures

It's not a political statement by Google, but an algorithm just doing its job.

  • Share
  • Read Later

If you find yourself using Google to search for an image to accompany the phrase “completely wrong,” you may be surprised by the results: Pages and pages of photos of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Here’s a screenshot of the Google image search taken Thursday at 3:45 p.m. ET:

The result was first noticed by the website Mashable and by commenters on Twitter.

A Google spokesman told CNN, that what we are witnessing is nothing more than “the unintentional result of normal Google analytics, which produce images associated with popular phrases in news headlines and search terms, and not the result of any effort to skew the results.”

In short, it’s not a political statement by Google, but the search engine’s algorithm linking Romney’s image to the phrase “completely wrong.” The mathematical correlation occurred after the former Massachusetts governor, went on Fox News to disavow the now infamous disparaging remarks he made about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes. The “47 percent” comments came to light in mid-September after the release of a secretly recorded video from a May fundraiser. During his apology, Romney deemed his comments in the now infamous 47 percent tape “completely wrong.” Hence the algorithm and the search results.

MORE: Romney on ’47 percent’: I Was ‘Completely Wrong’

MORE: Romney’s 47% Video: Five Charts to Fact-Check the Remarks