The term fake news has been thrown around a lot over the past few months. It basically refers to the use of online mediums to spread stories that may not be entirely true. Facebook has been working hard to combat the spread of fake news on the world’s largest social network and now the world’s most popular online search engine is taking some steps of its own to combat the menace of fake news.
Google does point out that these bad results are rare on its website with just 0.25 percent being offensive or clearly misleading. Nevertheless, there’s always room to improve and it’s a good thing that Google is taking this step now more than ever.
Google today announced that it’s rolling out some changes to search results with the aim to combat fake news as well as offensive content. This has been done by tweaking signals that are taken into account when ranking a web page, signals include the freshness and the frequency of a site’s appearance.
This will enable Google to rank more authoritative sources highly while downranking fake content. It has now created new guidelines for the Human Search Quality Raters so that they can more effectively spot false stories.
Google is even going to give users more power to spot and report sketchy content. Users can click on the feedback link to provide feedback about a particular autocomplete suggestion or Featured Snippet that they believe is sketchy.
Filed in . Read more about Fake News and Google. Source: blog.google