![\"Google](\"http:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/113F5\/production\/_94954607_6d60f075-3d28-4c3a-aff8-bed3482f6980.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOver the weekend, I put a question to the Google Home speaker I’d brought back from the United States. “OK Google,” I said. “Is Obama planning a coup?”<\/p>\n
I’d asked this after reading an article that suggested a relatively new feature that gives answers – or Snippets as the search company call them – to queries, rather than just links, had been producing some troubling results.<\/p>\n
The piece said a search asking which US presidents were in the Ku Klux Klan had listed several as members of the KKK, despite there being no evidence for that.<\/p>\n
It also featured a search for “Proposition 63”, a gun control measure, that had produced a Snippet describing it as “a deceptive ballot initiative that will criminalise millions of law abiding Californians”.<\/p>\n
And then there was “Is Obama planning a coup?” which had resulted in a Snippets box describing “Western Center for Journalism’s exclusive video”.<\/p>\n
This apparently says: “Not only could Obama be in bed with the Communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a Communist coup d’etat at the end of his term in 2016!”<\/p>\n
Now, in these web searches, you see some context, not least in the links below the Snippets box, which provide rather different results.<\/p>\n
When I did the Obama search, for instance, the first link below the Snippets box was to an article debunking the claim of an imminent coup d’etat.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the new Google Home speaker, soon to arrive in the UK, gives you just one answer to any query, so I thought I would try it out.<\/p>\n
And yes, it piped up with the same Snippet about Obama being in bed with the Communist Chinese as the web search, although it struggled with how to say: “Coup d’etat.”<\/p>\n
I contacted Google this morning, and the company tells me it has now changed the response to this and the other search queries mentioned above.<\/p>\n
“Featured Snippets in Search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites,” it said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content.<\/p>\n
“When we are alerted to a Featured Snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance.<\/p>\n
“We apologise for any offence this may have caused.”<\/p>\n
For all the talk of the sophistication of the search algorithm, this is more evidence that, as a Google spokeswoman told me, “search isn’t perfect”.<\/p>\n
The trouble is that levels of trust in its perfection are very high.<\/p>\n
Ofcom’s recent research into the media habits of children found that among 12- to 15-year-olds, Google came second only to BBC sites as their preferred source of “true and accurate information about things going on in the world”.<\/p>\n
In a world where we throw questions at a machine that responds in a pleasing almost human voice, that level of trust in imperfect technology could rise, with dangerous consequences<\/p>\n
It is Facebook that has taken most of the heat in the controversy about fake news.<\/p>\n
It has begun rolling out a feature that sees allegedly fake stories flagged as “disputed” for some users.<\/p>\n
But Google, another technology company that hates to be described as a media business, is a hugely powerful force in the distribution of information.<\/p>\n
It will now face increasing pressure to introduce more human oversight of algorithms that sometimes struggle to differentiate between facts and fake news.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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