Sample this AI: Google for toilet paper, Pak flag comes up

These claims apparently follow the Pulwama terror attack and the resultant tension between India and Pakistan. When the search went viral, Google disowned any such show.

Google said the pictures came from a meme website and are from 2017 and that it is now trending because of the articles published in traffic-driven news portals.

"While we continue to investigate the matter, we have not found any evidence that Google Images was ranking the Pakistani flag in response to this particular search. Many news outlets wrote about an old screenshot from a meme website that is inconsistent with our UI and dates back to 2017, and we have not seen any independent verification that these results ever appeared as depicted. Since these news stories published, images from those articles are now ranking for this query, as the pages contain words relevant to the search," said a Google spokesperson, according to press reports.

The topic went viral as images of the search results were posted on Twitter at #besttoiletpaperintheworld hashtag.