Google Search Improvements Will Reduce Fake News Results: Shashidhar Thakur

Google Search already receive some artificial intelligence (AI) tweaks to enhance user experience. But with the swift growth of inferior-quality content, Google is now in the process of improving the quality of its search results. VP of Engineering Shashidhar Thakur on the sidelines of Google for India 2017 on Tuesday stated that Google is making continuous efforts to cut down on the amount of fake news content listed on its search engine.

"Whether it's in India or internationally, we make sure that we uphold a high bar when it comes to the quality of newsy content. Generally, in search, we find this type of content algorithmically," Thakur told Gadgets 360. The algorithms deployed behind Google Search look for the authoritativeness of the content and its quality to rank them appropriately. Thakur said that this continuous improvement will uplift the quality of the search results over time.

"We improve ranking signals on our search engine from time to time to overcome the issue of fake news. Signals help the system understand a query or the language of the query or the text or matching different keywords to provide relevant results," explained Thakur.

Similar to other search engines that use code-based bots to crawl different webpages, Google Search indexes hundreds of billions of webpages consistently. Once indexed, Google Search adds webpages to different entries that include all the words available on those pages. This data is then processed to the Knowledge Graph that not just looks for any particular keywords but also picks user interests to give relevant results.

"Inferior-quality content on the Web isn't a new and special problem," Thakur said. "But certainly, it is a problem that we need to solve by continuous tuning and making the underlying search algorithms better. This is indeed a very crucial area of focus for us."

Google isn't the only Web company that is taking the menace of fake news seriously. Facebook and Microsoft's Bing are also testing new developments to curb fake news. A recent report by Gartner predicted that fake news will grow multifold by 2022 and people in mature economies will consume more amount of false information over the information that is true and fair.

Having said that, Google is dominating the Web space and its search engine is the most prominent area for counterfeit content. Thakur at the Google for India stage revealed the number of daily active search users in India has grown two times in the last one year. The Mountain View, California-headquartered company also released Google Go as the lightweight version of the flagship Google app on Android devices.