Google has revealed that it will include more queries in its content advisories where its AI systems have low trust in the overall caliber of the search results. According to Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President of Search, this does not imply that there is a lack of useful information or that a particular result is of 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.
In order to enhance the quality of the search result snippets that are displayed at the top of the page for searches, Google also introduced the most recent AI model, known as the Multitask Unified Model (MUM).
“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 business claimed that it has improved its algorithms’ ability to recognize misleading premises, which are uncommon but necessitate not displaying a featured snippet. With this change, Google claimed to have reduced the triggering of highlighted snippets in certain situations by 40%.
The “About this result” section of Google is also getting more context, including information about how extensively used a source is, online reviews of a source or company, whether a company is owned by another entity, and even when our systems are having trouble finding much information about a source.
In addition, Google announced a collaboration with MediaWise at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs to create information literacy lesson plans for middle and high school instructors.
