Google ‘aggressively intervened’ to forestall deception about coronavirus
- Environment
- March 12, 2020
Google has “aggressively intervened” in some of its online services to forestall deception about coronavirus, Bloomberg News detailed.
Virus-related searches brief news from mainstream publications and data from National Public Radio, the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, the story said.
“You’ve heard me talk about helpfulness in the context of moments big and small,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo to employees, Bloomberg reported. “This is one of those big moments.”
Google is likewise attempting to “quickly remove” YouTube videos that tout options in medical treatment for the virus.
Likewise, the organization has blocked a large number of ads that endeavor to gain by the virus, Pichai said in another recent update. The organization has given governments and not-for-profits free ad space on YouTube to talk about the virus, Covid-19, as indicated by the story.
However, Googles focuses on that it isn’t physically changing search results.
“Our systems are designed to automatically detect searches that may be related to topics like health and apply the same treatment of elevating reliable and authoritative sources in the results,” a company spokeswoman told Bloomberg.
Pichai has been managing “a major overhaul of the company’s approach to health care and medical information,” even before the coronavirus outbreak, Bloomberg said.
“He has hired health-care industry executives for a new division that uses Google’s artificial intelligence and cloud-computing prowess to develop new revenue from the sector,” the story said. “The coronavirus is the first real test of this initiative.”