The so-called “false news” are almost as old as man himself however, with the proliferation of the internet and new digital media, also there have been many websites that, in the best of cases, offer misleading information and at worst, clearly false and/or offensive.
But Google appears ready to fight against the false news and so has announced new measures that will help to reduce the amount of news and false content appearing in its search results.
Demote sites with false news, the aim of Google
In a post published by the company in its official blog last Tuesday, 25 April, Google says that close to 0.25% of search results offering its search engine every day corresponds with what the company referred to as “clearly misleading or offensive content”, which does not correspond to what users are really looking for.
Faced with this situation, Google has made some changes in their “search quality guidelines” that are used by “assessors” human responsible for checking the quality of Google search results and provide appropriate feedback to the company. These new guidelines include details of what Google qualifies as “low quality websites” that could contain and provide “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, untruths and conspiracy theories” not shown.
Google says that these evaluated humans will be able to detect that kind of web sites, and that their work and reviews will help the company to degrade these sites in general search results.
In addition, the company has also applied new search criteria thanks to which Google may offer more precise search results, at the time that degrades the contents of lesser quality.
Finally, Google is also incorporating new features in the section of the public regarding the “AutoComplete” feature comments from the search bar so that users may notify Google if they feel that something of what appears in the search bar using auto-complete and a search suggestion, is inappropriate, as you can see in the image above this post…
A form similar to the above for the case of prominent fragments that appear at the top of some search results is also available.
Do you think of the new measures taken by Google to combat the false news on the net?
