Google Battling Nefarious Actors Trying to Manipulate Search Results
Company official says 2,000 changes to search engine algorithm made annually
Google search, the premier internet technology tool used for up to three billion online queries a day, is under constant attack by malicious actors seeking to manipulate its results, a company official says.
'We've been dealing with people trying to trick the search engine with spam since the day Google was founded'
Chinese government has ability to restrict results of internet services conducted on Google search
"When we talk about nefarious information and nefarious players, we often tell people we've been dealing with people trying to trick the search engine with spam since the day Google was founded," Gingras told a journalism conference last month.
"We have thousands of people working on these issues, so we have scale abilities to do things that others may not."
The control mechanism was discovered in the spring of 2016, and was assessed as allowing the Chinese government to limit China's 500 million internet users from gaining information from search results opposed by Beijing, such as information about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of hundreds of unarmed pro-democracy protesters, or dissidents.
Critics of very large tech companies such as Google and Amazon have suggested they be broken up under anti-monopoly laws.
Others have called for applying a fairness doctrine for search engine results
Google uses a core algorithm called PageRank that match words contained in online documents to search terms. The search engine was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.
Google's ad platforms are used by 2 million publishers around the world and more than 70 percent of the $13 billion in ad revenue went to publishers.
Gingras said one error by Google was promoting to the top of its search results a false story misidentifying the shooter behind the Las Vegas mass murder last year. "Our systems aren't prefect and they never will be because the ecosystem is constantly evolving," he said.
Myron Levin, head of the online news outlet Fair Warning, said the traffic shifts were a "complete mystery," and called Google's controls over searches a "black box."
As for search engine optimization experts paid to increase online traffic, Levin said "they're witch doctors."
"They're reading chicken bones and surmising what the gods of Google are thinking. But they don't know either," he said.
Ben Gomes, Google vice president for engineering, said in a blog post last year that people or systems have tried to "game" its system in order to produce search results that appear higher in results. The technique is done using "content farms," hidden text, and other deceptive practices.
"We've tackled these problems, and others over the years, by making regular updates to our algorithms and introducing other features that prevent people from gaming the system," he stated.
Because information and documents are coming online in the tens of thousands every minute of every day, newer methods are being used like fake news, Gomes said.
The problem is "content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive, or downright false information," he said.
Gomes said good progress is being made in dealing with fake news and that has driven more structural changes in the search engine, such as better search ranking, easier feedback mechanisms and greater transparency on how the engine works.
http:// freebeacon.com/national-security/google-battling-nefarious-actors-trying-manipulate-search-results/