Google Tweaking Top Stories Algorithm To Filter Out Fake News?

It looks like Google is or has worked on tweaking the top stories algorithm to filter out fake news sites, or rather, promote higher quality news sites from showing in that box. This is around Google’s efforts to not show fake news including banning some AdSense publishers.

The BBC reported earlier this month, an interview with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai who said “there should just be no situation in which fake news gets distributed.” In fact, he added that Google would “make our algorithms better,” to make sure to “drive news towards more trusted sources.”

The interesting part is not too long ago, just two years ago, Google opened up the top stories box to all publishers – not just Google News sources. It was not uncommon to see results in that box from Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News or very low quality blogs. Now with AMP, it was even more likely because those sites can quickly deploy AMP and see their stories show up faster.