Google Rewrites Its Powerful Search Rankings to Bury Fake News
- Plan is to remove misleading, offensive pages from top results
- News searches now given special treatment like finance, health
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Google isn’t planning to rid fake news from its search results -- but it’s trying to purge it from the top.
The Alphabet Inc. company is making a rare, sweeping change to the algorithm behind its powerful search engine to demote misleading, false and offensive articles online. Google is also setting new rules encouraging its “raters” -- the 10,000-plus staff that assess search results -- to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories and what the company calls “low-quality” content.