The so-called "fake news" is almost as old as the human being, however, with the proliferation of the internet and new digital media, too websites have multiplied that, at best, offer misleading information, and at worst, clearly false and / or offensive.
But Google seems willing to fight fake news and to do so has announced new measures that will help reduce the amount of fake news and content that appear in your search results.
Degrading fake news sites, Google's goal
With a post published by the company on its official blog on Tuesday, April 25, Google states that about 0,25% of search results offered by your search engine every day corresponds to what the company calls "Offensive or clearly misleading content", which does not correspond to what users are really looking for.
Faced with this situation, Google has made some changes to your "Search Quality Guidelines" They are used by human "evaluators" in charge of checking the quality of Google search results and providing the appropriate feedback to the company. These new guidelines include details of what Google qualifies as "Low quality websites" that could contain and offer "misleading information, unexpected offensive results, falsehoods and conspiracy theories" not proven.
Google notes that these human screeners will be able to detect such websites, and that their work and feedback will help the company in downgrade these sites in general search results.
In addition, the company has also applied new search criteria thanks to which Google will be able to offer more accurate search results, while degrading lower quality content.
Finally, Google is also incorporating new features in the section on public comments regarding the "AutoComplete" feature of the search bar in such a way that users can notify Google if they feel that something that appears in the search bar through autocompletion and as a search suggestion, is inappropriate, as you can see in the image above of this post ..
A form similar to the previous one is also available for the case of featured snippets that appear at the top of some search results.
What do you think of the new measures adopted by Google to combat fake news on the net?