Washington: Former United States President Donald Trump ripped into Google and called the search engine “rigged”. Trump said he called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to complain that the platform has only bad stories about him.
In an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, Trump mentioned that he called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to highlight the issue. “I called the head of Google the other day and I said, ‘I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google’,” he said.
Pichai, Trump said in the interview, told him that “you’re the No. 1 person on all of Google for stories”.
When asked, “Should Google be broken up,” Trump said “Yeah, look, Google’s got a lot of power. They’re very bad to me. Very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories… in other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories, and everyone’s entitled to that, you’ll only see the 20 bad stories. I called the head of Google the other day and I said, “I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google.” I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google’s rigged just like our government’s rigged all over the place.
‘Not A Fan Of Google’
Trump further said, “I’m not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair. They do treat me very badly”.
He said that he would “do something” about it (Google) before adding “I give them a lot of credit they’ve become such a power”.”How they became a power is, you know, really the discussion,” he said.
“At the same time, it’s a very dangerous thing because we want to have great companies — we don’t want China to have these companies. Right now, China is afraid of Google.”
During the interview, Trump also addressed his evolving stance on TikTok – a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance.
“I think everything is a threat,” Trump told Bloomberg. “Sometimes you have to fight through the threats.”
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice is weighing asking a federal judge to break up Google after a ruling in August that said the company illegally acted as a monopoly in its search business.
