What’s All the Fuss About?
Google wants to warn you about unidentified search results
Data voids
What are they?
Online searches that produce little or no reliable results, creating a vacuum in which someone with malicious intent can spread misinformation. Data voids can occur because the search query is obscure or hasn’t been typed very often, but it also happens when a news story is breaking.
Can you give an example?
Yes – or rather, Google can. In a recent blog post ( www.snipca.com/38806), it referred to the search term ‘ufo 106 mph’ ( 1 in screenshot right), which became suddenly popular in 2016 following reports that a police helicopter had filmed a flying saucer in Wales. It’s precisely the kind of rumour that spreads quickly through social media, prompting people to search online for more details. The problem is that reputable news outlets usually haven’t had time to research and fact-check such claims, and therefore have yet to publish an article about it. Into that gap can step someone keen to spread lies, linking a hastily written – and highly misleading – article to the search term. It’s easy, for instance, to imagine a blogger claiming that the UFO sighting “proves” that governments are suppressing proof of alien life.
Does Google have a plan to tackle this?
Yes. It has trained its algorithms to “detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn’t yet weighed in”. In such cases it will tell you that “these results are changing quickly” 2 , and advise that with new topics it can “sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources” 3 .
Why is Google doing this now?
Two reasons: the Covid-19 pandemic and last year’s US election. It didn’t specifically mention these in its blog, but both events triggered a wave of misinformation that ranged from mostly harmless speculation to dangerous lies. Google was criticised for not warning people about these, so it has responded with measures to reinforce the legitimacy of its results.
What else has it done?
In February it added a description taken from Wikipedia about where a search result has come from. On its blog ( www. snipca.com/38808) it gave the example of a search about coronavirus producing information from The Lancet. Clicking the three-dot menu next to the result brings up a box with this description from Wikipedia (see screenshot below): “The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is among the world’s oldest and best-known general medical journals.” Google says this info (available only in the US at the moment) helps you “make a more informed decision about the sites you may want to visit and what results will be most useful for you”.
Isn’t all this giving Google too much power?
Some will think so, particularly those who think Google (and other tech giants) shouldn’t be the judge of what’s considered reliable. Many people are angry that until May Facebook was removing posts that claimed Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a theory that is now gaining credibility among scientists and government officials. Google won’t want to make a similar mistake, and is careful to state that it isn’t actually commenting on the accuracy of results, only that it’s a quickly changing situation and more detailed information may emerge later.
So, just to check: was a UFO filmed travelling at 106mph?
We’ll reply as soon as we can remove this alien probe from our nostrils.