– Google systems cannot check content accuracy; instead, this search engine relies on signals which, according to the established rules, it considers matching to a “topic and authority relevance “ – says Danni Sullivan, a Google employee, as reported by searchengineland.com.

Danni tweeted it on his personal account on Sep. 09, attracting SEO attention and launching a discussion.

Attempting to improve quality of its results, Google announced the Project Owl in April 2017; the project primarily focused on content and enabled users to provide feedback on search and search results suggestions.

In November 2017, Google also joined Trust Project in order to add more transparency to news content and fight against dissemination of misinformation.

In September 2019, the company updated guidelines for evaluating search quality in order to highlight news source assessment, including an option of ranking articles and content promoting hatred, which can be ranked with the lowest grade.

A big issue that Google is tackling is that, regardless of technology advancement, it is still a giant programme, i.e. a “machine”. Thus any form of machine learning and functioning does not enable thorough assessment of accuracy, since it is impossible to provide results based on previous experiences.

According to Sullivan, topic relevance is crucial for Google, not ranking.

Source: searchengineland.com