Thanks to a new update, netizens will get fewer answers to questions like, “When did Snoopy murder Abraham Lincoln?”
“Who are the American presidents who are members of the Ku Klux Klan?”, “what happened to the dinosaurs?”, “how to get in touch with the Illuminati?”. Here is a non-exhaustive anthology of questions that Google should soon no longer answer, spotted the Daily Mail.
In any case, this is the wish of the team in charge of the search engine. The latter announced, in a blog post, an update to the “featured excerpts” feature. This is a selection of text from a website that appears at the top of Google search results designed to quickly respond to a user’s query.
Fighting misinformation
Objective: to obtain more coherent explanations and avoid the proliferation of fake news. For good reason, a few years ago, to the question “are women bad?”, the search engine replied in a featured extract: “every woman has a certain degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a bit of bad in her… Women don’t like men, they like what they can do for them,” reports the Daily Mail.
“We have configured our systems to better detect these types of false information. With this update we have reduced the triggering of erroneous featured snippets by 40%”, underlines Pandu Nayak, vice president of Google in charge of the search engine. .
In an attempt to address the root cause of these errors, Google also plans to introduce warnings in cases where a correct answer does not exist for a query. “It seems that there are not many good results for this search”, now warns the search engine to the Internet user.
In 2017, Google was accused of spreading fake news after a search result for the query “Is Obama planning a coup” concluded with the answer: “Obama might be planning a communist coup at the end of his mandate in 2016”. The search engine had found the information on a conspiratorial site.