For a brief time Monday, President Trump had Google on his side.
According to a report in The Washington Post, former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was briefly labeled as “fiction.”
The result came up on Google’s homepage when the reader searched for the words “Mueller Report,” according to a screengrab taken by The Post on Monday. As would be customary for a published work, the right side of the page provides a preview of the work, a brief description, purchase options and other information (the left side is links and videos that mention the book).
One of those categories in what the tech giant calls the Google Knowledge Graph is the book’s “genre,” and there the Mueller Report was labeled “fiction.”
While Mr. Trump hasn’t directly called the report into purported collusion with Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election a piece of “fiction,” he often denounces the investigation as a witch hunt and the collusion charges a hoax. And he has used the word “fiction” to describe some of the tell-al books published about his administration.
In response to queries from The Post, Google called the result an error, but did not explain how it happened or how long the book had been thus identified. It is now labeled as “non-fiction.”
As of 4 p.m. Monday, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was silent.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.