Google Rewrites Algorithm To Bury ‘Fake News’ in Search Results
Contractor previously cited Infowars as example of untrustworthy content
Adan Salazar
Prison Planet.com
April 25, 2017
Popular search engine Google is reconfiguring its algorithm so that so-called “fake news” does not appear at the top of search results.
Google parent company Alphabet, Inc. recently announced a “rare, sweeping” change to its search function intended to bury “misleading, false and offensive articles online,” according to Bloomberg.
While the change doesn’t mean “fake news” will be eliminated entirely (yet), pages deemed to be “low quality” will be ranked lower in search results so as not to promote the content.
Google claims the new changes are in response to the “fake news” pervasive throughout the 2016 presidential election.
“It was not a large fraction of queries — only about a quarter percent of our traffic [0.25 %] — but they were important queries,” said Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president of engineering for search.
“It’s not a problem that is going to go all the way to zero, but we now think we can stay a step ahead of things,” Gomes said.
Google users will also be enlisted to flag offensive search results, “Featured Snippet” content and Autocomplete suggestions in realtime.
One example used by the company showed the query “is Obama planning a coup” produced a snippet which contained unconfirmed, speculative content from a lesser-known website.
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