Problematic searches" is a term I gave to a situation where Google is dealing with the consequences of the "post-truth" world. People are increasingly producing content that reaffirms a particular worldview or opinion regardless of the actual facts. In addition, Internet users search in sufficient volume for rumors, urban myths, insults or derogatory subjects that influence the search suggestions offered by Google in an offensive and possibly dangerous way. These are problematic searches because they don't fall into clear areas where Google has generally taken action. Google has long dealt
with search spam, where people try to manipulate its results outside of acceptable practices for monetary gain. He had to deal with piracy. It had to deal jewelry retouching service with low quality content showing up for popular searches. Problematic research is not one of those problems. Instead, they involve fake news, where people completely make things up. They involve heavily biased content. They involve rumors, conspiracies and myths. They may include shocking or offensive information.
They pose an entirely new quality problem for Google, hence my name "problematic searches". Problematic searches aren't new, but generally haven't been a big deal due to their rarity. In an interview last week, Pandu Nayak – a Google Fellow who works on search quality – spoke about this: “It turns out to be a very small issue, a fraction of our query flow. So it doesn't show up very often or almost never in our regular ratings and so on. And we see these problems. It looks like a small problem,”