Google faces flak after search engine highlights false election story

Google's search engine last week highlighted an inaccurate report that claimed president elect Donald Trump had won the popular vote in the presidential election, in the latest example of false information spread on the internet. 

The incorrect results were featured Monday in a two-day-old story posted on the pro-Trump ''70 News'' site. A link to the site featured near the top of the search engine's influential rankings of relevant news stories for searches on the final election results.

Google acknowledged the problem, however, as of mid-afternoon Monday, the link to ''70 News'' remained prominent in its results.

Although Google does not normally remove content from search results, it is now taking steps to punish sites that spread falsehood. Google said on Monday, that it would prevent its lucrative digital ads from appearing on sites that ''misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information.'' According to commentators, the step could offer sites a bigger incentive to get things right or risk losing a valuable source of revenue.

False information has been around on the internet since long, and there has been no dearth of debunkers busting unfounded claims and urban legends for over two decades.

The problem has however gained more attention after the bitterly fought US presidential election in which Trump, a Republican billionaire and former reality TV star, defeated Hillary Clinton, a Democrat and former US secretary of state who had been widely expected to emerge victorious.

Last week, Facebook was the target of criticism over its habit of featuring less than accurate news reports that are said to have contributed to the election of Donald Trump - a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. Google is now faced with a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaced fake election results.

According Dan Abrams, of Mediate, who was the first to report, when searching for ''final election numbers'' or ''final vote count 2016,'' the first result in Google's ''in the news'' box is from the site in question. The article, posted on 12 November featured the headline ''Final Election 2016 Numbers: Trump Won Both Popular ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) and Electoral College Votes( 306-232)…Hey CHANGE.ORG, Scrap Your Loony Petition Now!''