WATCH: Google CEO forced to explain why Trump's photo appears when you search for 'idiot'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday found himself having to explain why his company's search engine retrieves photos of President Donald Trump when a user enters in a search for the word "idiot."

During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) informed Pichai that Googling the word "idiot" at the moment brings up several images of the president. She then asked him to explain how that sort of thing could happen.

"We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword... we have gone out and stored copies of billions of pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals," Pichai replied. "Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query."

Lofgren then jokingly asked Pichai if there was "a little man behind the curtain" secretly rigging search results against conservatives.

"We don't manually intervene [in searches]," Pichai replied.

Watch the video below.