Google begins news fact-checks, publishers advised accordingly

Source:lifehacker.com

The Google News service now has an authenticity checking mechanism which filters its news coming from various sources. Ideally, Google collects all these news articles and sorts them into specific categories. But there was no way for readers to check the correctness of the information.

Today, Google has answered this concern. They have included fact-checking insights beside popular stories on their news page.

There already are quite a number of website that allow readers to check the facts on some news sources and they are undeniably increasing in fame. It is this growing popularity which motivated Google to structure a fact-checking function on Google News.

Source:lineshjose.com
Source:lineshjose.com

In order for publishers to remain in the Google search index, they need to include the appropriate label in the coding of their respective websites. Google provides a list of these labels.

Schema.org is a synergistic community consisting of the world’s largest online networking sites. It secures a library of computer codes that are commonly used by webmasters for structuring webpages. ClaimReview is one of these familiar terms and it will be used by Google in the compilation and organization of factual news stories.

Readers can get bits of facts when they expand the view of the news article. The service is available in North America and the United Kingdom for both web and mobile platforms.

Google indeed has the capacity to interpose wrongly tagged news posts. They have provided more information as well as detailed instructions properly labeling news sources on their support page. Therefore, it should be unlikely that we shall see news stories proving that the earth is flat on the first page of Google’s search results.

Sites that do not abide to Google’s criteria on ClaimReview may be removed from Google News. The networking company sends this advisory to all content providers and publishers.

The addition of such service Google News may not guarantee a total elimination of false stories but it can significantly minimize its existence. It will now be more difficult to put fallacious content on Google than it had been without this fact-checking function. The service will become imminent the coming weeks. Perhaps this has been done quickly to keep up with the advent of the U.S. presidential election.