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."

Comments

Users can report?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it's a democratic process to determine what news is fake? Ah yes, the "if we all agree it's not true then it isn't" method of understanding the universe.

Let's go burn down the observatory so this can never happen again!

Do No Evil

[110010001000]

They are the leaders.

Better idea

[OYAHHH]

Google needs to quit pretending and just limit it's search results to NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

That would fix it.

Google is evil right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect so, and I don't trust Google, or, Alphabet.

I never asked for censorship on the internet. And an algorithm? A freaking experiment on society.

Re:Google is evil right?

[jonow]

Regardless if I think Google can do this effectively and neutrally, I don't think this is the answer. I don't think any service or institution curtailing "fake news" is going to do a good job of it, and even if they do, I don't think it will be effective.

The problem is people actively seeking support to their view and disregarding anything contrary. By filtering results, you are just ensuring those people go elsewhere for their fake news.

I believe that real change on this front will only come from a long-term investment in education. We can't filter everything a person sees, nor should we want to. What we should want is every citizen capable of determining fake news for themselves. We aren't going to change a majority of view's or opinions by marking news fake or filtering it and in fact, I believe it will make the problem worse as people feel their information is being controlled.

People in this country need to have to tools to determine what is fake and what is real on their own. If they don't have those tools and are unable to critically consider facts, then there is no codling that will help them.

Re:Aka "The Trump Muzzle"

[ganjadude]

better off banning slate, salon, msnbc, foxnews, cnn, breitbart. that would clean up a good 80% of fake news

Slipery slope

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, another self proclaimed judge to "offensive content". I'm sure the automated tools will be great at banning all the bad words.

I find google offensive, now, ban google.

*licks finger, sticks it in the air*

[Anonymous Coward]

What's Offensive today?

This is bullshit

[JWW]

Either all speech is protected or none of it is.

Re: Aka "The Trump Muzzle"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of like how MSNBC blamed the recent riots in Venezuela entirely on a Trump campaign donation, and made no mention of the rampant starvation or roving death squads supporting the regime?

Yeah... Tell us more about fake news, dipshit.

Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

The underlying problem is Google is supposed to be a *search engine* It's supposed to show you where to find stuff on the internet. At some point in time they decided to complete with Ask Jeeves and become an "answer engine." Good luck with that.
 

Re:Truth

[swillden]

The underlying problem is Google is supposed to be a *search engine* It's supposed to show you where to find stuff on the internet. At some point in time they decided to complete with Ask Jeeves and become an "answer engine." Good luck with that.

It has always been an answer engine, and that's the reason it became popular.

Back in the day (mid 90s) most everyone was certain that search engines could never be very useful. Lycos, Altavista, etc. weren't terrible, but they also weren't very good, because although they could effectively spider the whole web that just meant that any search matched thousands or millions of pages, and they had no way to determine which of those were the best answers for the query. The "smart money" was betting on Yahoo!'s approach of manually curating enormous lists of links.

Then Larry Page's pagerank algorithm found an excellent (not perfect, but excellent) way to figure out which of all of those answers were likely to be the best ones. That insight launched Google. It took off precisely because it provided better answers, rather than just returning a list of everything that was on the Internet. A list of everything on the Internet is not useful.

Re:Truth

[AthanasiusKircher]

While I guess you have a point that Pagerank was designed to deliver better results, so were all other "search engines" of the time. Pagerank was just a better algorithm than others. But by your definition all search engines back then were "answer engines," since they all were trying to rank results somehow.

The thing is: back then Google's algorithms were still based on terms actually found in the searched pages. Hence, it was still a search engine. The ranking may have been tweaked, but you were still searching for actual text and actual search terms.

Somewhere around 2005 or so, it became possible for Google to serve up top hits that no longer contained the literal search terms. At that point it ceased to be a "pure" search engine and became about trying to guess what you wanted rather than just retrieving pages with your text. As the years went by, Google deprecated and screwed up the plus operator, increasingly screwed up verbatim search until it became nonfunctional for people who just want a literal search, and incorporated "personalization" to serve up pages more like other pages you've viewed, rather than what you literally asked for.

Google hasn't been a functional search engine in about a decade.

Re: Aka "The Trump Muzzle"

[Anonymous Coward]

Have leftists ever thought about why so many average people are turning away from so-called "mainstream" news sources, and instead choosing to get their news from alternate sources?

Yes, over three hundred years ago:

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believâ(TM)d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceivâ(TM)d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effectâ¦

Seriously, look at your own recitation and find the lies and falsehoods in them. There are plenty.

And yours aren't even new. The anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party was preaching its hysteria before the American Civil War. Civil War secessionists built their cause on a house of lies. Anti-Indian, Anti-Irish, Anti-Chinese, Anti-German, Anti-Jewish, Anti-Russian sentiment was similarly fostered with fraud.

The question you should ask, is why you think leftists don't know, while you seemingly demonstrate great depths ignorance yourself.

Or rather, you should answer it.

Re:Aka "The Trump Muzzle"

[Nethemas the Great]

Anyone can gin up nonsense to fit a curve. That's what fake news largely is. The biggest error I see in most mainstream media is the assumption that details and context can be omitted. It is far easier to digest a simpleton falsehood compared to reality when the audience lacks the foundational information to understand it. You cannot communicate the complexities and nuance of reality in 30 second sound bites.