Google overhauls search algorithm in bid to fight fake news
Google overhauls search algorithm in bid to fight fake
news
By James Titcomb 25 APRIL 2017 • 3:00PM
Google has promised to alter its search results to punish
websites promoting extreme views, conspiracy theories and fake news.
The internet giant said it would demote “low-quality”
websites and let users report offensive results after criticism that neo-Nazi
groups and hoaxers were “gaming” the company’s search engine.
Google has been under mounting pressure in recent months
for appearing to promote fake news and conspiracy theories in search results.
The company’s search engine, which is driven by computer
algorithms, has often struggled to differentiate between reputable sources and
unsavoury websites, leading it to include extreme viewpoints or lies in its
results.
On Tuesday Google said it had hired a team of
“evaluators” to assess the quality of its search results and said it had
adjusted its algorithm to promote authoritative pages such as reputable news
sources and government websites, and punish those deemed low-quality.
The changes come after Google’s search engine was found
to prominently feature fringe websites in search results, including pages
denying the Holocaust and claiming that Barack Obama is planning a White House
coup.
The company has also been criticised over suggestions
offered by its Autocomplete feature, which predicts what a person is typing,
and the Direct Answers box at the top of its search results, which attempts to
answer simple questions by quoting from a website, have also caused offence.
In one example, Autocomplete was found to suggest the phrase
“are women evil” when a user begins to type “are women”, and the Direct Answer
box would respond by asserting that “every woman has a little evil in her”.
On Tuesday Google said users will be able to report
offensive suggestions from the Autocomplete feature and false statements in
Google’s Direct Answer box, which will be manually checked by a moderator.
Inaccurate results are often featured in search results
due to “Google bombing” tactics employed by internet-savvy groups that force a
website to be ranked highly. These tactics include linking to the offending
website from several other sources and hiding text on a page that is invisible
to humans but which the search engine’s algorithms can read.
“In a world where tens of thousands of pages are coming
online every minute of every day, there are new ways that people try to game
the system,” Google’s Ben Gomes said. “In order to have long-term and impactful
changes, more structural changes [to Google’s search engine] are needed.”
Technology giants including Google and Facebook have been
under pressure to stem the rise of “fake news”: online articles that are
deliberately false but created to bring in advertising revenue or spread
misinformation.
MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee are
currently holding an inquiry into the phenomenon amid fears that fake news has
disrupted elections in the US and Europe.
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