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Google Looks at People As it Pledges To Fight Fake News and 'Offensive' Content (betanews.com)
Google said today it is taking its first attempt to combat the circulation of "fake news" on its search engine. The company is offering new tools that will allow users to report misleading or offensive content, and it also pledged to improve results generated by its algorithm. From a report: While the algorithm tweaks should impact on general search results, the reporting tools have been designed for Google's Autocomplete predictions and Featured Snippets which have been problematic in recent months. Updated algorithms should help to ensure more authoritative pages receive greater prominence, while low-quality content is demoted. Vice president of engineering at Google Search, Ben Gomes, admits that people have been trying to "game" the system -- working against the spirit of the purpose of algorithms -- to push poor-quality content and fake news higher up search results. He says that the problem now is the "spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information."
Oh and BTW, the way you use a literal search engine with thousands or millions of results is to introduce more specific search terms to narrow your search to a reasonable number. Back then people COULD use search engines to find specific content very well that way. I used to be able to use Google to find specific pages again years later if I remembered a few specific unique words or phrases that could get me back to that specific page... I haven't been able to reliably do that in years. As you point out, that type of searching is less useful when you're doing a broader search for a vague topic and just want the "best" hits (by some metric). Early on, Google tried to combine the two, but the former approach requires search strategy and understanding how to use operators and such to get useful results in narrowing down a topic. Most internet users today never learned how to use a search engine -- they just want to type in a few vague things and expect good stuff to come up, even if it's not what they literally asked for. Google has thus decided to serve the latter crowd, though I still don't quite understand why that required them to screw up literal search for those who request it. (BTW, for those who don't know and want more literal search, verbatim on Google is really poor these days. Try the allintext: operator instead, though even that is a crapshoot was to whether the specific results you want will actually show up.)