Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's picture featured in "Top 10 Criminals" in the Google search engine.

The image has been featured among the likes of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, Al Capone, Joseph Kony and Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The search results appear with the following disclaimer from Google, "These results don’t reflect Google’s opinion or our beliefs; our algorithms automatically matched the query to web pages with these images."

Indian media reports quoted a Google spokesperson as saying: “These results trouble us and are not reflective of the opinions of Google. Sometimes, the way images are described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries.”

Google said that results to the query "top 10 criminals in India" was due to a British daily which had an image of Modi and erroneous metadata.

It said that in this case, the image search results were drawn from multiple news articles with images of Modi, covering the prime minister's statements with regard to politicians with criminal backgrounds, but added that the news articles do not link Modi to criminal activity, and the words just appeared in close proximity to each other.