While Google’s mission has always been to surface high-quality content, over the past few years the company has worked especially hard to ensure that its search results are also consistently accurate, credible, and trustworthy.
Reducing false and misleading information has been a top priority for Google since concerns over misinformation surfaced during the 2016 US presidential election. The search giant is investing huge sums of money[1] and brain power into organizing the ever-increasing amounts of content on the web in a way that prioritizes accuracy and credibility.
In a 30-page whitepaper[2] published last year, Google delineates specifically how it fights against bad actors and misinformation across Google Search, News, Youtube, Ads, and other Google products.
In this whitepaper, Google explains how Knowledge Panels — a common organic search feature — are part of its initiative to show “context and diversity of perspectives to form their own views.” With Knowledge Panel results, Google provides answers to queries with content displayed directly in its organic search results (often without including a link to a corresponding organic result), potentially eliminating the need for users to click through to a website to find an answer to their query. While this feature benefits users by answering their questions even more quickly, it brings with it the danger of providing quick answers that might be misleading or incorrect.
Another feature with this issue is Featured Snippets[3], where Google pulls website content directly into the search results. Google maintains specific policies for Featured Snippets, prohibiting the display of content that is sexually explicit, hateful, violent, dangerous, or in violation of expert consensus on civic, medical, scientific, or historical topics. However, this doesn’t mean the content included in Featured Snippets is always entirely accurate[4]