Google Will Warn Users When Search Results May Be Reliable

Google said Friday will warn people when looking for breaking news or other “rapidly evolving” issues that their search results may be unreliable. It is one of several verification of facts measures that the technology giant has incorporated in recent years to curb the spread of disinformation and provide an important context for issues starting the online trend.

The new prompt warns users that the subject in question is developing, so their search results will change soon when more authoritative information comes to light. “If this topic is new, it can take a long time for the results to be added from reliable sources,” says part of the prompt, which looks above the search results. In short, take everything you see with a grain of salt for now.

To determine when to include the warning, Google has trained its software systems to detect rapidly developing topics that have a limited range of sources that weigh in so far, according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public link for search.

“We are now showing a warning indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources may be available,” he wrote in a blog post. Friday.

Google has confirmed it Recode Thursday he started testing this feature about a week ago. At the time, a company spokesman told the store that the warning is only in a small percentage of search results on trending topics that are still in development. These notices were shot in English for U.S. users earlier, but Google plans to extend the version of the feature “for the coming months,” the company said Friday.

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In an interview with Recode, Sullivan said that the notice isn’t meant to indicate whether the results you’re seeing are right or wrong; it’s a warning that additional information may come out later. For example, he cited suspected UFO sightings and recent trending search queries such as “why is britney on lithium” and “black triangle ufo ocean” as searches that could trigger the notice.

“When anybody does a search on Google, we’re trying to show you the most relevant, reliable information we can,” Sullivan told the outlet. “But we get a lot of things that are entirely new.”

Between the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election and the global covid-19 pandemic, online platforms have faced a reckoning for their role in the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. Google is one of several tech giants working to provide more context to what people come across on the internet. Last year, it added fact-checking labels to images found through his Google Images search and knowledge panels to search for results on covid-19 vaccines, among other updates aimed at improving research literacy.

More recently, at its annual developer I / O conference in May, Google launched a new label for search results – “About this result” – to give American users an important context on the sources that see, CNN reported. The company also said it is working with Wikipedia to incorporate news feeds to provide users with background information on websites, including brief descriptions.