But then Lieu pivoted — pulling out his smartphone for a search in real-time — and entered King's name into Google.
King, who was sitting across the room on the powerful House panel, became visibly perturbed.
"I'm going to change one word. So I'm going to search for 'Congressman Steve King,' I'm going to hit the 'news' tab. First article that pops up is from ABC News," Lieu said. "It says Steve King's racist immigration talk prompts calls for congressional censure. That's a negative article. But you don't have a group of people at Google thinking and trying to modify search results — every time Steve King comes up, a negative article appears, that's not what's happening, right?"
Pichai again said no, reiterating that Google does not manipulate results for individuals like that.
"So let me just conclude here by stating the obvious," Lieu responded. "If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things."
"And to some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter, consider blaming yourself," he added.
