Google Search: Search engine giant Google has ramped up its features, and has now come up with a way to warn users about the search results related to a breaking story. It is a known trend that whenever a story is breaking or evolving, the first instinct of users is to head to Google to search for it. However, an evolving issue also translates to evolving search results, with there being some delay in information from credible sources being posted. Hence, it seems that in order to avoid the spread of fake news or misinformation, Google has decided to give a warning to its users whenever they search a developing issue, saying “It looks like these results are changing quickly.” The warning, the company demonstrated, is followed by a subhead that explains, “If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.”
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At present, the tech giant is rolling out this feature in the US, and is only supported in the English language. However, Google has said that it is looking to expand this functionality to other countries over the next few months.
In order to put out this warning, the company has modified its system to assess when a topic is evolving rapidly and “a range of sources hasn’t yet weighed in”, it said.
Google said that Google Search tries to provide the most useful results every time, sometimes, reliable information on some topics is not available online, which is especially true for breaking news or topics that are yet emerging. In such cases, the information that is first published is not necessarily the most reliable.
With this, while bad or false content would not vanish from its search result, at least some of the false legitimacy in the minds of the people about high ranking content on Google could be removed, even if it is not entirely clear so far what the company is determining to be a sufficient range of sources.