Like its rival Facebook, Google is making moves to fight the misinformation it helps spread.
Some Google searches yield more than clickable links — they result in snippets that the laziest of searchers can take away and claim as truth in the age of instant gratification and smart speakers that read search results out loud.
The problem is some of those snippets, surfaced by algorithms, have been controversial or just flat out wrong — sometimes fake news.
“Last year, we took deserved criticism for featured snippets that said things like ‘women are evil’ or that former U.S. President Barack Obama was planning a coup,” Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, said in a blog post Tuesday.
Google’s solution? It’s going to offer up even more snippets.
“There are often legitimate diverse perspectives offered by publishers, and we want to provide users visibility and access into those perspectives from multiple source,” Matthew Gray, the software engineer who leads the featured snippets team, told Sullivan in the post.
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