The Google News app offers users a quick method of ensuring that news headlines do not mislead them with its ‘Perspective & Context’ feature. While this has been existing for long, it seems many do not use it enough to fact-check sensational headlines.
Understanding that we live a world governed by information, people always seek to know what is happening. This is regardless of whether they hunt for trending news or information pieces. The fact remains that people keep searching.
Google has undoubtedly reigned supreme in the search engine world. According to the SEO Tribunal, the search engine giants received an average of 63,000 searches per second in 2019. It also had about 90.46% of search activity in the same year.
This means that almost everyone uses Google to look for answers, briefs, information and so on. Understanding this huge responsibility, the Alphabet-owned company embedded a special feature in its news app in 2018.
The Google News app comes with a feature that allows users to do a quick background check on headlines. It comes below the picture in the headline and instructs you to “Tap for perspectives & context”.
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It is becoming risky to trust headlines because many are tweaked to attract clicks and may be easily misunderstood. Since this will detract from Google’s goal which is to keep you informed, the company has matched deceitful writers and bloggers.
While the Google News app gives you top stories that are tailored to match your interest from your online activities, it gives you a way to ensure the information is right.
What the feature does is quite simple: it allows you to see what other top media outlets are saying about the story in the headline. Besides this, it also shows top Tweets about the topic from Twitter. In addition, there will be a live coverage section if available as well as videos.
All of these will give you a proper perspective of what the headline means without having to read the full article.
This is an encouraging addition from Google and helps stem the surge of misinformation. Recently, Google and other top platforms like Facebook and Twitter started to prevent users from seeing false coronavirus posts and news. It only allowed users to see posts from trusted sources while searching for the virus.
With the imminence of more deepfake media in the future, it will be interesting to see how the search engine giant reacts to it.
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