Regina Ip Demands Google Answers

Ip asking for Google to come to Legco to answer questions

The saga over the wrong anthem played at rugby matches overseas continues to be dragged out, this time by Executive Council convenor Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, who wants Google executives to answer questions in the Legislative Council.

She said she would write to Legco president Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen to invite the behemoth search engine to answer lawmakers' questions, and if they refused, Ip would seek to invoke the Legislative Council (Power and Privileges) Ordinance to summon them. 

"If they ignore the summons, a warrant can be issued. It's a criminal offence and offenders can be jailed up to 12 months," she warned.

The 2019 protest song is the top search result

In other words, the Google executives are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Ip added a majority in Legco was all that was needed to call on the ordinance.

Last month Hong Kong's rugby team competed in Incheon, South Korea, where Glory to Hong Kong, a song associated with the 2019 protests, was played instead of the Chinese national anthem, March of the Volunteers.

Korean organisers apologised for the incident, claiming when they looked it up online, Glory to Hong Kong came up first. And so pro-establishment lawmakers are urging Google to tweak the algorithm so that March of the Volunteers came up first.

The lawmakers, in a bid to prove their patriotism to their Beijing masters are probably hoping to get air time grilling Google executives, but they won't get very far.

The wrong anthem was played in Incheon

As long as people keep searching for "Hong Kong anthem", then the protest song will come up first -- this is how Google works because this is what users are searching for. No amount of buying advertising will change the algorithm, as I found out in a podcast called Freakonomics in an episode called "Is Google Getting Worse?"

Freakonomics host Stephen Dubner interviews Liz Reid, vice president of Search at Google.

At one point she explains the correlation between search results and advertising:

"Behind the scenes in Search, we take great pride in not only trying to provide high-quality results, but ensuring that they are not influenced by ads. So we have a very strong culture that says whether or not you're an advertiser, does not allow you to change the results we show. You cannot pay us to change how you show. Those results are very pure, and we go to great lengths to ensure that this is the case. And so the quality of the search we provide is run separately from the ads to do that."

Reid says ads and search results are separate

So one can imagine if and when these Google executives go to Legco, lawmakers are going to go red in the face with frustration that the search engine giant will refuse to budge. 

But watching this process might be entertaining so don't miss it!