Google Maps results require signs from many points on the internet – including news outlets,” the Google representative said. It is a bug and we are working to fix this as fast as possible.”

Google reviews of the university revealed a barrage of one-star reviews uploaded in the past few weeks, responding to political protests and the events on the campus. By Friday afternoon, Google Maps was among the very best ten India tendencies on Twitter. She discovered that the JNU result just showed up for searches if used outside the state from an IP, and for those on Google India.

“Google’s search engine appears to be correlating the key word “JNU” with these terms owing to their incredibly large concentration in the Google Maps reviews along with related metadata from other content online. This really is very common for subjects which discussed on social media sites and are broadly written about online.

Google search algorithms are understood to take into account terms which are often used collectively to show results. In July 2015, for instance, controversy broke after Google pictures began revealing PM Narendra Modi’s picture if one sought for “Top 10 Offenders in the World”. Google had subsequently issued an apology for the faux pas, and said, “Occasionally, the way pictures are described on the world wide web can give astonishing results to particular queries. We apologise for mistake or any confusion this has caused. We are constantly working to enhance our algorithms to stop unexpected results in this way.” Google Maps has previously been subjected to pranks. In May 2015, after a picture of an Android bot urinating on an Apple symbol appeared on a map, Google had to temporarily freeze its Map Maker function.