Americans See Misleading Info Daily in Search Results. So Google is Making Changes

Google said it’s improved the accuracy of its search engine to provide better results in Featured Snippets, the descriptive box at the top of a results page that highlights information related to your search. This comes as a study from Poynter and YouGov, released Thursday, found 62% of people say they see false or misleading misinformation online every week. 

The improvement to Featured Snippets is one a handful of the changes Google’s made to provide better quality information to people using its search engine. Google Search can now understand what is the consensus on a certain query by checking across other sources deemed to be high-quality. 

Search can also now detect some false premises, the company said in a blog post Thursday. For example, a search for “when did snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln” came back with the accurate information about Lincoln’s assassination but ignored that Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s beagle in the Peanuts comic strip, was not the culprit.  Google also made updates to About this Result, a tool available for people to get more context about a search result.

More information about the source of the search result will be available, and it now has its own page on the Google iOS app. This new page will also be coming later this year to Android and in other languages, including Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese and Indonesian. For results where Google Search doesn’t have a high confidence in the results, it will now provide a content advisory.

The company implemented advisories last year for breaking news when a topic was changing rapidly. These notices don’t necessarily mean the information provided isn’t current or helpful, but it will say the result may not be reliable.  Google along with the Poynter Institute of Media Studies and YouGov released a study Thursday about information literacy showing that 47% of respondents say they see false or misleading information online daily.

The study also showed that 36% were somewhat confident they could identify false or misleading information. GenZ respondents, roughly those born from around 1997 to the early 2010s, were twice as likely to perform multiple searches and use reverse image search to verify information than Boomers, those born after 1942 and before 1964.

a slide from a study Poynter/YouGov

The study interviewed 8,585 people in seven countries: the US, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, India and Japan.

Of the respondents, 1,269 were from the US, and the interviews took place between June 27 and July 20. 

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