Google, the world's largest search engine, is leading the push for accountability and quality content. In partnership with Duke University's Reporter's Lab project, the company has embedded fact-checking features to its Google News service, enabling content creators to see errors and inconsistencies with anything they're about to write, even before it is published.
These days, it's hard to distinguish web content from web discontent. Whether it's reading from a blog or from a news site, it seems as if everything else is repackaged according to a certain trend.
What's doubly hard is maintaining a working algorithm to sift out spam from what matters. Search engine optimization firms will love this feature, as it challenges their digital content teams to provide unique, relevant and engaging output.
With writing grounded on facts and material evidence, this provides credibility and integrity to a platform's content. The site now allows aggregations for trending and timely news from multiple source to be grouped with tags that that sorts data as "opinion," "local source" and "highly cited."
With this feature, both ordinary readers and professional content makers will be able to see highlighted fact-checks before clicking on a link, as indicated on trending or viral content. Google cites the growth of fact-checking sites like ClaimReview from Schema.org as one of many reasons why they've implemented the said feature, aside from recently updating their search algorithms to weed out badly-spun content, according to Moz.
The new feature allows pre-defined source labels to be tagged into new fact-checked posts. The effect of this stricter implementation provides factual background data for stories. This data set is then compiled from multiple sources, allowing the data to become intuitively structured and easily accessible.
Online communities like those built at on Scheme.org are sponsored by Google, with the project gaining support from Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. The implementation will be rolled out in the U.S. and U.K at first, with worldwide support to follow in the next months. In a report by TechCrunch, Google explains that it still holds the right to intervene or put down a site. The condition here is when posts become tagged as verified when they really aren't. Google warns if they "find sites not following those criteria for the ClaimReview markup," they will, under discretion "either ignore that site's markup or remove the site from Google News."
In the hopes of preventing fraudulent news stories meant to provoke or incite outrage without factual merit from rising to top search results, Google's News division is trying its best to do the hard work for its millions of users. It is quite possible though, that well-loved satirical like The Onion might go down the drain with this new policy.
