On: Expanding Fact Checking at Google

[fcg221]

I thought that this article might be about fact-checking the excerpts from web sites that Google sometimes presents as an answer to a Google search. One egregious instance of such a result that needs fact-checking is for the search "Is Donald Trump a citizen?"[1], for which this featured snippet appears at the top:

    Donald Trump is NOT Natural Born. Donald John Trump, Senior,
    was born in Queens, New York on June 14, 1946. He presents
    himself as a person eligible to the Office of President of
    the United States, yet, he does not have the parentage
    necessary to be a "natural born citizen."
    
    Donald Trump - NOT Natural Born - Natural born, The National Society ...
    natural-borncitizens.com/donaldtrumpnotnaturalborn.html

I doubt that Google wishes to represent this excerpt, from a website whose views are on the fringe (to say the least) as fact. Perhaps Google should be more careful about automatically displaying snippets pulled from websites as fact.

[1] https://google.com/search?q=Is+Donald+Trump+a+citizen?

[chimeracoder → fcg221]

Similarly, as recently as a couple of months ago, searching "Firefox" in Google yielded an ad for a malware site masquerading as Mozilla.

Google does make some effort to prevent these, but it's clearly not enough - that particular example happened for literally years.