Fake News and Google Page Ranking
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-25/google-rewrites-its-powerful-search-rankings-to-bury-fake-news
Throughout the past political cycle, the emergence of fake news has caused the country and media to go into a frenzy. It’s all people have been talking about in regards to how the recent election turned out and the reasons behind Donald Trump’s victory. Fake news is news that is purposely published with false information by opposing parties in order to rally support against a certain candidate using fake facts about them. This has caused unwanted and unfair results in politics and the news cycle, and many tech companies such as Google and Facebook are trying to use advances in machine learning and natural language processing to stop fake news from even getting read by the public. In fact Google has recently upgraded their page ranking algorithm in order to combat this epidemic.
Google is utilizing it’s army of page raters that read search results and improve or demote their ratings, to manually remove articles that are deemed to have fake news. Google is also using it’s large natural language processing engine to minimize fake news page rankings as well as limit the amount of auto fill on searches related to fake news. This relates to the PageRank system we discussed in class, where search results were ranked based on how many other links they connect to and how popular those links are. In order to minimize a lot of these rankings for fake news, Google is working toward eliminating the search results with high rankings due to connected links that are also related to fake news. Hopefully this new technology will create a more merit and truth based political system in the future.