Google Search mixes up Jawaharlal Nehru for Narendra Modi, Twitter explodes

A glitch in Google’s search engine had users flummoxed for a while. When people googled "india first pm" on Wednesday, the key search box correctly showed the name Jawaharlal Nehru, but the photo adjacent to it was that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

And this was not the only faux pas, it seems Google picked pictures of current position holders for searches about ‘india first finance minister’ and ‘india first defence minister’ as well. Ironically, Microsoft’s Bing search platform was doing exactly the opposite of this. On Bing, searching for "india first pm" would show an image of Nehru but ‘Narendra Modi’ as the name.

As expected, Twitter users could not miss this opportunity to take screenshots and potshots at the company and also the government.

Divya Spandana the Head of Social Media and Digital Communications of the Indian National Congress was predictably miffed at this error and tweeted:


In response, Twitter user Abhinav Agarwal was kind enough to the share the reason behind the glitch with this tweet:


But Twitterati, both famous and not so famous, decided to cash in and what followed was a barrage of tweets expressing anger, annoyance and of course amusement.

Sanjiv Bhatt, the Former Indian Police Service officer known for his role in filing an affidavit in the Supreme Court of India against Narendra Modi shared the following tweet:


Then came a tweet by Salil Tripathi, contributing editor at Mint and at Caravan Magazine:


And then there was the inevitable veiled attack at the government:

And then some tried to add an element of humour:


Google, of course, has corrected the issue, getting rid of the image altogether. It just shows a plain Wikipedia page for Jawaharlal Nehru now.