Google rewrites algorithm to bury 'fake news'
Posted by Factnews | 7 years ago | 2,311 times
Google has Kickstarted moves to make sweeping change to the algorithm behind its powerful search engine so that purported “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,” Bloomberg reports.
The popular search engine is also setting new rules encouraging its “raters” – the 10,000-plus staff that assess search results – to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories and what the company calls “low-quality” content.
The moves are consequent upon criticisms that came the way of Google and Facebook Inc. for hosting misleading information, particular tied to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Google executives claimed the type of web pages categorized in this bucket are relatively small, which is a reason why the search giant hadn’t addressed the issue before.
The vice president of engineering for Google, Ben Gomes, stated that
“It was not a large fraction of queries — only about a quarter percent of our traffic — but they were important queries”.
Source: culled from Thewill
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