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Google says it has new ways to combat its so-called fake-news problem in search results.
Over the last few months, Google, along with Facebook and other digital platforms, has struggled to keep hoaxes and fake news stories from appearing in search.
The examples were pretty unsettling, including Holocaust denials, a claim that President Barack Obama was running for a third term, and a wide range of other conspiracy theories.
On Tuesday, Google will have new feedback tools in its search results so users can flag content that appears to be false or misleading. (Facebook launched similar tools earlier this year, along with tips to help you spot fake news.) This will help teach Google's search algorithms to weed out hoaxes and, in theory, keep them buried in search results.
Google also says its algorithms have now been trained to demote "low quality" content based on signals like whether the information comes from an "authoritative" page.
I can't see how this can do anything but fail spectacularly. You?
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-launches-new-search-tools-to-combat-fake-news-2017-4
(Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Saturday April 29 2017, @09:39PM
Remember the story about US federal agents running guns to Mexican crime gangs which resulted in many murders including that of Brian Terry of the US Border Patrol? It goes by the names Project Gunwalker [archive.org] and Fast and Furious [wikipedia.org], and the story was researched and broken by two independent journalists: Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea.
The surviving journalist reports [blogspot.com] regular [blogspot.com] and continued problems with his breaking stories being blocked from inclusion in Google News feeds [blogspot.com], thus greatly limiting exposure (even if the same stories aren't censored from a general Internet search).
Doesn't appear to be appropriate to list under "conspiracy theories" if the events are actually occurring.