Alphabet Inc (GOOGL)

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Alphabet's Google to Improve Algorithms to Combat Spread of Fake News

4/26/17, 12:34 PM
12:34 PM EDT, 04/26/2017 (MT Newswires) -- Alphabet's (GOOG) Google said on Wednesday it's improving its search algorithms to combat low-quality content, offensive material and the phenomenon of "fake news."

The most high profile issue it's facing is "the phenomenon of 'fake news,' where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information," Ben Gomes, vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post.

He said while it's making good progress in tackling the problem, in order to have long-term and impactful changes, more structural changes in the its search engine are needed.

The next step toward improving the search engine to bring up more high-quality content from the web, includes improvements in search ranking, easier ways for people to provide direct feedback, and greater transparency around how search works.

"It's become very apparent that a small set of queries in our daily traffic (around 0.25%) have been returning offensive or clearly misleading content, which is not what people are looking for," he said. "To help prevent the spread of such content for this subset of queries, we've improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content.

It also gave new guidelines for the people who rate search results for the company to enable them to appropriately flag misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories.

GOOG and GOOGL shares were down 0.2% and 0.1% respectively on Wednesday afternoon.

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WHO AT GOOGLE DETERMINES WHAT IS FAKE NEWS AND WHAT IS NOT?