Fake news will now be flagged in search results

folarin okunola

April 10, 2017 11:46 AM

Fake news is the new scourge of Internet-based media consumption and all the big boys are scrambling to get on the right side of consumer-related media.

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Everybody gets their news from the Internet these days and that means fake news is more lucrative, now more than ever. It’s been a big issue for Facebook over the past year and Google is not waiting to get caught in the web — thats why the search giant announced that it will start highlighting “authentic sources” in its search results.

Now, when you conduct a Google search, the tech giant will show a summary of whether the claims of the stories have been fact-checked or not. The company says an algorithm will judge sites and it will not be doing any fact-checking itself.

Google already does fact-checking on its news site (since October 2016) but it is extending that to its search results now. Search results will now say if a story has been fact-checked to be true or false but it won’t affect how search results are ranked and sites will no be labeled as untrustworthy.

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“These fact checks are not Google’s and are presented so people can make more informed judgments. Even though differing conclusions may be presented, we think it’s still helpful for people to understand the degree of consensus around a particular claim and have clear information on which sources agree,” said Google in a blog post.

This may not mean much in places like the US where people are more likely to get their news from Facebook than anywhere else (as Donald Trump’s election and Facebook’s fake news drama showed).

Still, Google is the biggest search engine in the world so it’s not far-fetched to think it’d go a long way in fighting this new age scourge. Google did not say if it will be extending the feature to YouTube (which is also one of the biggest search engines in the world) in the blog post so fingers crossed on that.

folarin okunola