‘Google takes on fake news with its biggest tool: Search’ – Mashable
Jason Abbruzzese says, “Google is fighting fake news with its biggest tool: Search.
Google announced on Tuesday that it’s tweaking its search engine to scuttle misleading or false content, a major move for the company and the world considering Google’s dominance in search.
The changes will include alterations to the search engine’s algorithms that choose which pages to surface in response to queries.
“We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear,” wrote Ben Gomes, VP of engineering of Google Search, in a blog post.
Holocaust denial has been a particularly difficult result for Google to deal with. Another tweak in December pushed a particularly popular page down in the rankings, though not out of the front-page results entirely for the query “Did the Holocaust happen?”
Google and Facebook have taken plenty of heat in the months following the U.S. election for not doing enough to protect users from misleading information, propaganda, and “fake news” — which has not emerged as a catchall for either poor-quality news or news that people just don’t like”.
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