Google has announced to expand content advisories to searches where its AI systems don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search.
Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search, said that this doesn’t mean that no helpful information is available, or that a particular result is low-quality.
“These notices provide context about the whole set of results on the page, and you can always see the results for your query, even when the advisory is present,” he said in a blog post late on Thursday.
“We have deeply invested in both information quality and information literacy on Google Search and News, and today we have a few new developments about this important work,” said Nayak.
Google also introduced latest AI model, called Multitask Unified Model (MUM), to improve search result quality in ‘snippets’ which are shown on top of the page for searches.
“Our systems can check snippet callouts (the word or words called out above the featured snippet in a larger font) against other high-quality sources on the web, to see if there’s a general consensus for that callout, even if sources use different words or concepts to describe the same thing,” explained Nayak.
The company said it has trained systems to get better at detecting false premises, which are not very common, but are cases where it’s not helpful to show a featured snippet.
“We’ve reduced the triggering of featured snippets in these cases by 40 per cent with this update,” said Google.
Google is also adding more context to ‘About this result’ feature, such as how widely a source is circulated, online reviews about a source or company, whether a company is owned by another entity, or even when our systems can’t find much info about a source.
Google also announced a partnership with MediaWise at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs to develop information literacy lesson plans for teachers of middle and high school students.
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