It's time for us to stop trusting Google search

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

About whether the results of the most popular search engine in the world are as reliable as we think.

On November 6, a shooting occurred in a Texas church that killed at least 26 people. Soon thereafter, Google began to promote search results with information that the suspect was a radical communist with direct links to the anti-fascist movement. The information appeared in the Popular on Twitter module, so it was hard not to notice it, although it did not appear at the very top of the list.

This was far from the first Google search error. As usual, the company promised to fix the problem and improve the algorithm for selecting results.

But this promise does not solve the main problem: the California giant's monopoly on truth.

According to research by Key trends in social and digital news media., very few people unconditionally believe the news on social media. But the same cannot be said for search engines, in which Google has long been the leader. The marketing company Edelman, in the course of a 2017 study, found that 64% of users believe information from search services. At the same time, only 57% of people trust news from traditional media.

Researcher Danah Boyd says Did Media Literacy Backfire? that instead of learning how to judge the credibility of information sources, students “just think Google is a reliable service and Wikipedia doesn't.” Google embraces this vision, as does Amazon and Apple, whose products are increasingly using virtual assistants.

Google Assistant makes the search service a reliable companion you can ask for anything. One of the main ideas is that people do not need to know any special commands in order to "talk" to a computer. Demonstrations of devices like Google Home show that Assistant is very good at analyzing the context of simple questions and guessing what the user wanted to ask. When an assistant speaks out false information, it is even worse than reading it from the screen.

Even if Google's results are overwhelmingly true, just a few false statements on topics like mass shooting can be a big problem. Especially when you consider that people believe everything Google tells them.

Even simply telling a company publicly that the results on its search engine are wrong can make it more careful to ensure that this does not happen again. Google must do everything it can to avoid showing fake news and conspiracy theories alongside the serious writing of competent journalists. We, in turn, should not regard search engines as sources of unconditional truth.

We must not only get Google to stop showing fake news, but we must also look for ways to limit the credibility of the search algorithms themselves. We should manually compile lists of videos for our kids, not just include YouTube Kids, which every now and then features content that is completely inappropriate for young viewers. We need to restore confidence in news that is curated by people, not computer systems. Why does Google have to exactly improve the features that cause false information to pop up on the web? Why can't the company get rid of them?