Google, on Tuesday, announced changes to its search algorithm in an attempt to push down fake news from its search results. The new updates include: Emphasis on authoritative content The new update aims to prioritise authoritative content over low-quality content. Ben Gomes, VP search at Google, explained in a blog post: "We combine hundreds of signals to determine which results we show for a given query—from the freshness of the content to the number of times your search queries appear on the page. We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear." Content may be deemed authoritative based on signals such as how often other sites link to the site in question and the quality of the sites that link, the affiliation of a site with a university or verified news source. More information on how Google identifies high-quality content from low-quality content can be found here. Direct feedback forms for users The new update also lets users flag inappropriate autocomplete suggestions and featured snippet answers. "The content that appears in these features is generated algorithmically and is a reflection of what people are searching for and what’s available on the web. This can sometimes lead to results that are unexpected, inaccurate or offensive. Starting today, we’re making it much easier for people to directly flag content that appears in both Autocomplete predictions and Featured Snippets," Gomes…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...