Tech giant Google has mistakenly declared the final of the Qatar World Cup, placing Brazil and France in the tournament’s finale.
For a short amount of time, online users who searched for “Lusail stadium events” came up with the result that revealed Brazil to face France at Qatar’s ‘jewel in the desert’ stadium.
As reported by the Twitter account AtaqueFutbolero, football fans may be rushing to call this a conspiracy set up by FIFA and the world’s elites. Still, it’s more likely that the ‘reliable search engine’ made a juvenile mistake.
Google has made mistakes in the past, and as the search engine expands, so will its ability to create errors.
The fight against misinformation
However, the tech-savvy company has plans to address such misinformation, and has recently announced new updates to tackle this.
As revealed in Google’s last month’s blog post, the company will now publicise a “content advisory” if users search up something with poor quality search results.Â
Google’s Pandu Nayak, the vice president of search, believes this innovative action will strengthen media literacy and combat misinformation worldwide.
“Sometimes interest in a breaking news topic travels faster than facts, or there isn’t enough reliable information online about a given subject. Information literacy experts often refer to these situations as data voids,” Nayak said.
“To address these, we show content advisories in situations when a topic is rapidly evolving, indicating that it might be best to check back later when more sources are available,” Nayak also stated in the Google blog.
For instance, if an individual searched “how to get in touch with the Illuminati,” Google would display its content advisories informing the users that there may not be reliable information on this topic.
The shift is expected to influence other tech companies to do the same as false news runs dangerously on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.