14 DAY TRIAL // Google is taking the fight against fake news to the search results. The company announced it was going to improve the search quality by bringing forth authoritative content.
"Today, 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. The most high profile of these issues is the phenomenon of 'fake news,' where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information. While this problem is different from issues in the past, our goal remains the same - to provide people with access to relevant information from the most reliable sources available. And while we may not always get it right, we’re making good progress in tackling the problem. But in order to have long-term and impactful changes, more structural changes in Search are needed," writes Google's Ben Gomes, VP for engineering.
In order to achieve this feat, the company is changing things up within its algorithm. First off, the company has new search quality rater guidelines which help the real people who assess the quality of Google's search results flag low-quality webpages. "These guidelines will begin to help our algorithms in demoting such low-quality content and help us to make additional improvements over time," Google says.
More changes to come
Additionally, ranking changes are also coming. The search engine combines hundreds of signals to determine which results they should show for a given query. They've now adjusted their signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content. This should help avoid issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that popped up back in December.
Google says that, when it comes to search, it has a relatively low fake news problem, with only 0.25 percent of queries returning offensive or misleading content.
However, the problem exists, so they've introduced direct feedback tools for Autocomplete suggestions and Featured Snippets boxes. Autocomplete now features a "report inappropriate suggestions" link below the search box, while the Featured Snippets existing feedback option has gained a way to let users report examples of fake, hateful, or vulgar information in the boxes.