Google Employs New Method To Combat Fake News And Offensive Content

With the tech giant still under a lot of pressure to do something about fake news and offensive content, Google is employing a new method to reduce the presence and visibility of either problem. The new solution largely has to do with the popular feature called “autocomplete,” which basically provides users with several search options by predicting what they might want to look for.

Google’s autocomplete feature works by having an algorithm take the letters and words that the users type in order to predict what they are searching before they are even done typing. This helps to increase convenience among users, but it also has the disadvantage of helping fake news and offensive content to spread.

By tweaking the feature a bit, sources and data that are tagged as inappropriate can be suppressed, The Los Angeles Times reports. This results in more effort on the part of users to look for particular information that can be considered fraudulent or hate speech, which Google has already made more difficult to find, anyway.

As the vice president for Google’s engineering division for search, Ben Gomes puts it, it’s unlikely for fake news to ever disappear on the internet. As long as the web exists, so will misinformation. However, companies like Google can at least be on their toes to make sure that the trend doesn’t become more mainstream.

“It's not a problem that is going to go all the way to zero, but we now think we can stay a step ahead of things,” Gomes said.

What makes the suppression of fake news and offensive content really difficult is the constant changes in search patterns by users. As PC World reports, up to 15 percent of the daily searches that Google gets is new. This makes them considerably more unpredictable, which means that the tweaks with the autocomplete feature have a harder time keeping up.