By Angie D. Holan
People’s complaints about Google search results — more spam, less usefulness — have been rising for a couple of years now. Previous complaints centered on product reviews, shopping and clickbait-y misinformation.
In recent weeks, though, Google took steps to downgrade fact-checking content, leaving fact-checkers scratching their heads. Why remove something so helpful?
Google decided to retire ClaimReview, a program little known outside the fact-checking world that highlighted fact checks from reputable news sources like PolitiFact, The Washington Post Fact Checker or Factcheck.org. The program was international in scale, also surfacing results from fact-checkers like Spain’s Maldita, the UK’s Full Fact, and Argentina’s Chequeado, among many others. Google said the structured data results would be gradually phased out.
The program worked like this: Fact-checkers added a short bit of code to their articles so search engines could recognize them as fact checks. That open-source code, called ClaimReview, let platforms like Google and Meta highlight verified information.
The highlights weren’t dramatic, but they did let people know that what they were searching for had been fact-checked, and pointed them to that content in a useful way. The program has been quietly chugging along, raising the profile of fact-checking for the past 10 years. More than 250,000 fact checks have been tagged with ClaimReview, and Google itself reported in 2019 that annual impressions likely reached 4 billion.
A Google search shows a ClaimReview result from PolitiFact. (Screenshot via Google)
It was a small, useful step toward improving overall information integrity on the internet and the quality of search results for end users. So why wouldn’t Google keep doing this?
Google says, confoundingly, that it’s aiming to improve search results with this action. It announced it was retiring ClaimReview in a blog post with a slew of other small technical changes, such as ending highlights for vehicle listings and educational videos. “Removing them will help streamline the results page and focus on other experiences that are more useful and widely used,” Google said.
Fact-checkers, to say the least, are none too pleased.
“For our users, it means we now risk being just another result, particularly as AI search Overviews begin to push high quality website results further down the page,” said Andrew Dudfield, head of AI at Full Fact “The work we have put into ensuring we explain how and why we come to a conclusion is thrown into the mix with a hodgepodge of other websites, and the internet becomes harder to trust.”
“Google did not inform fact-checkers that the 10-year collaboration was coming to an end, let alone consult with us on the decision to stop using the fact checks that we provided for free,” said Clara Jiménez Cruz of Maldita, in a post on Nieman Lab.
When asked by the International Fact-Checking Network about the move, a Google spokesperson who declined to be named said that the company had tested the change and concluded removing the program was a “minor cleanup (that) affected a very small percentage of results, does not change Search rankings, and our tests showed it has no impact on traffic to these pages.”
Some researchers have also defended Google against the charge that search results are worse. The problem might be that more junk content is being posted to the internet, and Google search results are simply reflecting that increase of low-quality information.
In the U.S., it’s one more kick in the teeth during an already hard year for fact-checkers. Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in January with high-profile announcements from Mark Zuckerberg and an appearance on “Fox & Friends” from Meta’s Joel Kaplan, in seeming deference to the Trump administration’s hostility to fact-checking.
Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post Fact Checker said he was sorry to see Google deprecate ClaimReview. Kessler, part of a small group that developed the idea in 2015, said he hopes the tagging system will have a future use for generative artificial intelligence and large language models.
Thanks to the decentralized nature of the internet, just because Google is losing ClaimReview, doesn’t mean others will. The code is part of an open-source system, promoted through Schema.org, and can be used on any search engine. Some fact-checkers are also using ClaimReview to provide cues to new chatbots and other AI applications.
Bill Adair of Duke University has promoted ClaimReview over the years as part of his work seeking to increase fact-checking automation. He says fact-checkers should keep using ClaimReview in the hopes that it will either yield new ways of informing AI search results, or give fact-checkers themselves new options to distribute their work as the internet evolves. ClaimReview, he said, is a practical way to denote high-quality fact checks as distinct from the junk content flooding the internet.
“Fact-checkers shouldn’t let the tech companies be the only ones who maintain a database of this important work,” he said.
