In a baffling incident, Internet search giant Google thinks that Ajmal Kasab had died by suicide. A search for the phrase “Ajmal Kasab death” shows the cause of death as suicide. This is displayed on the information panel displayed by Google, above the search results.
It may be noted that Ajmal Kasab was hanged to death on 21 November, 2012, following his conviction in the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. Kasab was the lone terrorist to be caught alive among the 10 Pakistani terrorists who had killed more than 150 people in several places in Mumbai between 26 and 29 November in 2008. Therefore, he was executed as per court orders, and he didn’t commit suicide.
But if one Googles for the cause of Ajmal Kasab’s death, the result shows suicide as the cause.
While Google is the most used search engine in the world, and it provides billions of correct results everyday, the data provided in the information box along with the search results have been found inaccurate in several cases.
The data displayed in the information box comes from third party websites like Wikipedia, and if those websites contain a mistake, the same error is reproduced by Google. Googles relies on Wikipedia heavily to provide answers for search queries of users, but being crowd sourced, the online encyclopaedia is not always correct, and moreover, it is often vandalised by miscreants, and left-wing editors hold an overwhelming power over what is published in Wikipedia, which results in biased articles on various topics. Such biased, wrong information is sometimes displayed by Google in its search results.
In such an incident earlier, Google was using the sentence “Hindu fundamentalists are admired by many of their co-religionists as virtuous people”, as an example of the use of the word ‘co-religionist’, a clearly biased anti-Hindu example. After widespread outrage on social media, Google had removed it from its search result. On further scrutiny, it was found that Google was sourcing the definition of the word ‘co-religionist’ from Lexicon, an online dictionary offering by Oxford Dictionary. While now the offending sentence has been removed from Google search, it remains in the Lexicon website.
While in some cases Google provides a link for the data shown in the information box along with search results, in this case, there is no link, so it is not sure from where Google derived that Ajmal Kasab had committed suicide. Ajmal Kasab was on a suicide mission to India, but he was accidentally caught. As most articles on him mention that he was on a suicide mission, it is possible that Google’s algorithm wrongly captured suicide as the reason for his death.
