Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has penalized holocaust denial sites on Google by ejecting them from appearing on the first page of search results. This follows criticism that has been leveled against the internet search giant after it emerged that a query on the search engine on whether the holocaust did actually happen was returning results from a neo-Nazi site.
Prior to the fix, a couple of top results questioning the historicity of the holocaust were not only returning results but were even giving a revisionist account of Adolf Hitler, placing him in a positive light. Google, however, admitted that the problem was a challenging one and getting it right was not always possible.
“Judging which pages on the web best answer a query is a challenging problem and we don’t always get it right,” a spokesperson for Google told Digital Trends.
The new move is a marked improvement from what Google had previously done to fix the problem, which was to give such results a lower ranking. It is not possible to determine how long the fix will hold in light of the fact that the previous fix failed to work consistently with the neo-Nazi website occasionally appearing as the top result. This even led to speculation that the supposed change by Alphabet had not actually been implemented.
Not the first time
For Google, this will not be the first time its search results and auto-complete has invited criticism. A review by a newspaper based in the United Kingdom demonstrated how auto-complete was giving suggestions that were insulting, hateful, and inflammatory towards women, Muslims, and Jews. Google has promised to keep changing its algorithms over time in order to tackle such challenges as they emerge. That, however, also raises important issues surrounding censorship. Additionally, it also raises the question of whether the functions of search engines can be completely entrusted to algorithms without having to involve human editors.
In the last trading session that took place on December 23, 2016, shares of Alphabet fell by 0.23% to close the day at $807.80.
