Google's John Mueller was asked if Google is filtering out web sites for searches related to the coronavirus. John said no, he isn't "aware of anything where we're manually filtering out sites specifically around health terms." He did say that Google wants to show a higher level of sites for health related terms and he also said Google does have special one boxes of information.
But he said Google is not filtering out web sites for these terms. But Google does have special elements in its search results to highlight data, important information and content from certain trusted organizations.
Here is the video embed when he said this at the 14:20 mark:
Here is the transcript:
Is Google controlling results related to some health terms, specifically Corona. By filtering out some specific types of sites? If yes, how can we make sure that it isn't filtering out other terms as well?So I'm not aware of anything where we're manually filtering out sites specifically around health terms.
I do know that specifically around health people have very high expectations of search results and therefor we work really hard to make sure that the search results that we provide there are of the highest quality possible.
So it's not so much that we need to filter things out but rather that we need to make sure that our algorithms are really working as as well as they should be. And having good algorithms that figure out what content is relevant for users or not, that's something that makes sense across the board. So it's not like we would only need to do that for one specific query but rather we can use these algorithms and use them everywhere. So whenever someone is searching for something and we have algorithm that helps us to better understand what they're searching for and to better show search results for that and we will try to do.
That so from that point of view it's not that we're doing anything really special for for these kind of terms. Maybe apart from the various kind of one boxes that we have in search where we try to kind of highlight the more current information a little bit better. But apart from that it's it's not that we're doing anything that we wouldn't otherwise want to do elsewhere in search.
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