BANGALORE • It was an odd, unanswerable question. Still, it was on the mind of at least one Google user in India. What is the country's "ugliest" language?

For anyone who typed the question into the platform's search bar recently, its algorithm produced a fact box confident of the answer: a tongue called Kannada, spoken by tens of millions of people in India's south.

Informed of that result, many of them were not happy.

Several politicians in the state of Karnataka, where most Kannada speakers live, went on social media last week to register their outrage. "Legal action will be taken against @Google for maligning the image of our beautiful language!" Mr Aravind Limbavali, Karnataka's forestry minister and a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's political party, said in a tweet last Wednesday.

Google apologised the next day for "the misunderstanding and hurting any sentiments". It also deleted the fact box about Kannada.

But its faux pas - and the response from Mr Limbavali and other members of the state's conservative political brass - had already been picked up by major Indian news outlets.

By Friday, the top results for the search "What's the world's ugliest language?" were articles about Google's apology for having answered it.

The episode illustrates the fallibility of fact boxes, a function that Google created seven years ago. The boxes, known as "featured snippets", contain information that the social media company's algorithms pull from third-party sources. They appear above the links that usually pop up in Google search results.

"Search isn't always perfect," Google India said in its apology on Thursday. "Sometimes, the way content is described on the Internet can yield surprising results to specific queries."

Kannada, the language that Google's fact box said was India's ugliest, is part of a family of Dravidian languages that are native to southern India and go back thousands of years.

NYTIMES