With increasing demands from users to work on the misinformation provided by Google search results, the giant has finally rolled out provisions to allow algorithms to take human input and flag content as ‘offensive’ or ‘upsetting’. This will hopefully lead to less of inflammatory and inaccurate content put forward during searches.



The humans being talked about here will not be regular users, but 10,000 plus ‘quality raters’ working for Google. They will have the responsibility to rate real queries and change them according to the guidelines that have provided by Google. This will include flagging content with hints of swearing, racism, violence against a particular section, and other offensive terminology. This will also include flagging graphic content including violence against children as well as animals.



The main purpose behind the move is to steer people with contentious queries to genuine websites and historical content instead of those spreading propaganda. The flagging of content will be based on guidelines provided by Google, which will mention what kind of content should be flagged as ‘ upsetting-offensive’ and what shouldn’t.

This is certainly a very positive and much needed move, that indicates towards better and more informative search results.