Google has started its
efforts against
fake news and the company has
publicly stated that fakes news ‘…is the most high profile’ issue that majority
of the people who uses Google’s search engine encounter. A significant
percentage of the average searcher’s results are either misleading, offensive
or fake.
Google has outright
stated that they won’t be able to ‘fully
solve’ the problem of fake news right now. People are hopeful that the company
is making some progress to get rid of the
world of fake news. It would take a lot
of resources and time for Google to transform that ‘small step’ into something bigger,
more long-term but it will definitely
happen in near future. Here’s how Google is fighting against fake news:
1. New
Search Quality Rater Guidelines
Search is one of
Google’s most important and primary
functions. Utilizing this system means that it quality should be checked regularly. Google works around this by
employing people and a complex process of
algorithms ,computation and and experimentation. This process is checked
and evaluated by real people who give Google feedback and suggestions for their search results and this covers both
quality and reliability. The ratings given by these people have no bearing when
it comes to individual page rankings but they do help Google in collecting data on the basis of quality of
their searches.
Google recently updated its Search Quality Rater
Guidelines that helps evaluators in their ratings as well as guide them in
finding and flagging fake news as well as low-quality websites.
Web sites or content
that are flagged by Google’s evaluators include but are not limited to the
following:
1.
Misleading Information
2.
Unexpected Offensive Results
3.
Hoaxes
4.
Unsupported Conspiracy Theories
Google’s goal in updating their guidelines was mainly developed to help
them tune its algorithms to demote the previously noted low-quality content as
well as to help them make improvements in the future and promote high quality
content.
2.
Ranking and Assesment Changes
Google combines and
analyzes a couple of hundred or so signals to determine or ascertain
which results or content they should
show for any given query. These signals include, but are not limited to:
1.
Freshness of content
2.
The number of times the search query appears on the page
3.
Relevance of the content
The company announced
that they have adjusted and altered the signals to help the users find more authoritative
pages as well as help them demote and
target low-quality content as well as
shady, shoddy and fake websites that promote fakes news or even unsupported and
unverified conspiracy theories.
3.
Direct Feedback Tools
Google is all about
making processes fast and precise. It doesn’t matter if it’s an everyday
process or something you do for work but they want everything to be more
efficient and faster. This includes their innovations and strategies for
Autocomplete or even Featured
Snippets to help searchers find
there goal .
Lets discuss Google’s
Featured Snippets, the company has clarified that the content which appears in
the featured snippets is generated algorithmically and is g what people search
for and is mostly available on the internet. Although, its not a perfect system
so from time to time, people are treated to be as inaccurate or unexpected search results so
Google decided to try and fix this issue.Google introduced an easy way for
people to report or flag questionable
content which appears in both autocomplete and the featured snippets.
The new feedback mechanism
was designed to allow users to flag
content more efficiently because of the newly labeled categories. People can
now accurately, precisely and directlly report to Google whenever they find
sensitive or unhelpful content.
Google then added that
they plan to use this feature to help them improve their algorithm in the
future.
4.
Greater Transparency
Google has received
numerous queries and concerns these past few months because people were
sometimes shown shocking or offensive, vulgar predictions that appeared on
Google’s autocomplete assist. Due to this, Google said that it has improved its
content policies and they had updated
them sufficiently.
People, if you have
any questions about autocomplete and Google’s approach for removals, then
please refer to their Help Center.
Key
Takeaway
Google is certainly
and consistently doing a lot of things to fight and stop fake news. These recent changes are obviously small
changes but I believe that misleading or downright fake content should be
devalued and ranked low if not taken down. We welcome these changes and think that this will challenge content
creators everywhere to step-up their game in order to be more authoritative and
more importantly, more reputable.
What do you think
about Google’s latest changes? Let’s talk about Google’s new policies in the
comments section below. I would love to hear from you.
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