As on Friday, searches in Google Maps using the terms ‘anti-national’, ‘sedition’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ brought up a map of Jawaharlal Nehru University as a result.
While the faux pas by the U.S.-based technology giant received a lot of flak on social networking site Twitter, a Google spokesperson said they were aware of the issue and were working to rectify the problem.
Interestingly, searches for ‘Rajnath Singh’, ‘Smriti Irani’ and ‘Rahul Gandhi’ also directed users to Jawaharlal Nehru University on Google Maps.
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A possible explanation for this may be a bug in algorithms used by the tech giant. The results shown by Google’s navigation service uses data from multiple points on the web, including news outlets, to optimise search results. Since, the terms ‘anti-national’, ‘Kanhaiya Kumar’, ‘natio-nalism’, ‘patriotism’ etc. have recently been used in news reports about JNU, the words have became associated in the Google Maps as well.