Google starts removing Holocaust denial sites from search results

PanARMENIAN.Net - After facing considerable backlash over its most popular product, Search, Google has made some major changes. Earlier this week, it was reported that the first result for a query in the U.K. on whether the Holocaust happened claimed it did not — and that the result was returned from a white supremacist website. Now, Google has changed its algorithm to remove that result (and other denial sites) altogether, Digital Trends reveals.

This is an improvement over a previous fix, which simply bumped the search result down a bit in popularity. Now, it appears to be completely gone. Of course, it’s unclear how lasting a fix this is, and this certainly won’t be the only problematic query (with even more problematic search results) Google will have to reckon with.

It’s not the first time Google has been in hot water for its auto-complete and search results — an earlier review by The Guardian found how some auto-complete results suggested searching for “are jews evil,” “are women evil,” and “are muslims bad.”

Worse yet, before Google issued its fix, several top results answered the queries about the Holocaust’s legitimacy in the affirmative with links to anti-Semitic and hate websites, with one top result even offering reasons as to “why Hitler was one of the good guys.”

When reached out, Google said its mission is to offer users diverse content from a variety of sources, but it doesn’t always “get it right.”

“Google was built on providing people with high-quality and authoritative results for their search queries,” a spokesperson told Digital Trends. “We strive to give users a breadth of diverse content from variety of sources and we’re committed to the principle of a free and open web. Judging which pages on the web best answer a query is a challenging problem and we don’t always get it right.”

When “non-authoritative information” ranks high in its results, the company says it develops scaleable and automated methods to fix the problem, “rather than manually removing these one by one.”

“We recently made improvements to our algorithm that will help surface more high quality, credible content on the web,” the spokesperson said. “We’ll continue to change our algorithms over time in order to tackle these challenges.”

Tech companies are increasingly facing criticism for perpetuating fake news. Facebook and Google are taking the issue seriously and have pledged to fix it — the former’s plan includes hiring a team of fact-checkers to eliminate fake news in its feed.