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In August 2016, a screenshot purportedly showing Google search results offering a definition of the word trap started circulating on social media. The results were decried as evidence of the search engine giant's having a liberal, anti-police agenda, because an example sentence demonstrating the meaning of the word trap referenced police herding demonstrators into a trap and then attacking and arresting them: The definition displayed above does appear when you enter the word trap into Google, but this screenshot is frequently shared with misinformation about how Google works. The main misconception is that the definition for the word trap was written by Google. However, the search engine giant does not maintain their own dictionary, nor do they provide their own answers to specific queries. Instead, Google points users to what their algorithms determine to be the most relevant information available on the Internet. In this case, the example sentence was most likely taken from OxfordDictionaries.com (although the same example appears in other online dictionaries as well). Even though the example sentence offered by Google may have come from Oxford Dictionaries, that organization's lexicographers did not write it either. Oxford Dictionaries explained in a January 2016 blog post that they glean example sentences from real-world sampling: In this case, the example sentence was apparently taken from an article written by Dave Lindorff in June 2003 and titled Civil Liberties Take a Dive Post-9/11: The use of trap in this particular sentence, then, is not a subtle attempt by Google to further a liberal agenda, but an example taken from an article about an actual event, demonstrating a very particular meaning of the word.
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