Google Adding Warning Labels on Rapidly Evolving Topics

Google is stepping up its efforts to combat misinformation, adding a warning label to “rapidly emerging results,” without much verified data.

Online misinformation is just one of the issues tech companies are dealing with. All too often, a topic goes viral before experts have a chance to weigh in with important, factual information.

Google is looking to address this by providing a warning label when an emerging topic has yet to have much reliable information supporting it.

“To help with this, we’ve trained our systems to detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn’t yet weighed in,” the company writes in a blog post. “We’ll now show a notice indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources might be available.”

The feature will initially be deployed for English results in the US, but will be expanding in the coming months.