Google has apologized for its second major mapping embarrassment in one month, after a racist slur involving the N-word was demonstrated as finding the White House on Google Maps.

Searches including “n****r house” and “n****r king” returned the home of Barack Obama as one of the top suggestions.

“Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offence this may have caused,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly.”

Google hasn’t explained what was to blame for the offensive search results, but it could well be the Map Maker tool which lets users modify maps. Map Maker has been shut down while Google sorts out the problem.

This isn’t the first time Google’s search tools have been linked with offensively racist results. A study by the Harvard law professor Latanya Sweeney previously demonstrated how names typically associated with African-Americans are more likely to trigger ads related to criminal activity.In another instance, Google’s controversial auto-complete system suggested racist queries when users typed the word “why” and let Google recommend sentences.Google Maps previously created headlines when Cult of Android discovered that a location near Rawalpindi, Pakistan prompted an image of the Android bot urinating on an Apple logo.Source: Washington Post