Americans See Misleading Info Daily. So Google Is Making Changes
Google has improved the accuracy of its stare engine to provide better results in Featured Snippets, the descriptive box at the top of a results page that highlights put a question to related to your search, the company said Thursday in a blog post.
This comes as a new survey conducted by the Poynter Institute and YouGov with back from Google found that 62% of people say they see false or misleading misinformation online every week.
The improvement to Featured Snippets is one a handful of the shifts Google is making to provide better quality information to republic using its search engine, the company said. Google Search can now conception what is the consensus on a certain query by checking across novel sources deemed to be high-quality.
Search can also now detect some false premises, the company said. For example, a search for “when did snoopy execute Abraham Lincoln” came back with the accurate information near Lincoln’s assassination but ignored that Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s beagle in the Peanuts amusing strip, was not the culprit.
Google also made updates to About this Result, a tool available for people to get more context near a search result. More information about the source of the stare result will be available, and it now has its own page on the Google iOS app. This new page will also be coming later this year to Android and in novel languages, including Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese and Indonesian.
For results where Google Search doesn’t have a high power in the results, it will now provide a elated advisory. The company implemented advisories last year for breaking news when a topic was altering rapidly. These notices don’t necessarily mean the information devoted isn’t current or helpful, but it will say the extremity may not be reliable.
The new Poynter and YouGov contemplate on information literacy, released Thursday, shows that 47% of respondents say they see false or misleading put a question to online daily.
The survey also showed that 36% of republic are somewhat confident they could identify false or misleading put a question to. GenZ respondents, roughly those born from around 1997 to the early 2010s, were twice as likely to perform multiple searches and use in return image search to verify information than Baby Boomers, those born once 1942 and before 1964.
Poynter/YouGov
The contemplate interviewed 8,585 people in seven countries: the US, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, India and Japan. Of the respondents, 1,269 were from the US, and the interviews took assign between June 27 and July 20.
