Google’s rocky road: Fake news, extremist videos & bad search results [Podcast]

Google is having a rough year. Extremist and hyperpartisan videos have made the term “brand safety” mainstream, as major advertisers pulled their ads from YouTube. Poor search results, like the featured answers for questions like “Are women evil?” or “Did the holocaust happen?” have shined a light on Google’s struggles to identify authoritative sources that can answer searcher questions. The company’s image has taken a hit.

But Google has started fighting back. It’s put new policies in place to govern allowable speech on YouTube, and it’s changed how it’ll penalize publishers whose videos get overrun with unacceptable user comments. It’s also taking steps to improve its search experience, like being more explicit in explaining when it might remove search suggestions and also inviting users to flag troublesome search answers.

Is that enough? In this week’s episode of Marketing Land Live, I put that question to our very own Danny Sullivan and Ginny Marvin, both of whom have closely covered Google’s difficulties in these areas. We talk about Project Owl, the new YouTube policies and much more.

This week’s show runs about 32 minutes. You can listen here or use the link below to subscribe via your favorite podcast service.

We invite you to subscribe via iTunes or Google Play Podcasts.

Show Notes

Google’s “Project Owl” — a three-pronged attack on fake news & problematic content

Google expands AdSense hate speech policy, launches page-level ad removal capabilities

How Google assesses the “authority” of web pages

Thanks for listening! We’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing Land Live.