After testing for several months, the new fact checking feature in Google Search has now been enabled for everyone. The new feature is rolling out now and it could take a few days for everyone to receive it. Just make sure you are running the latest version of the Google app on your Android phone. The new feature is pretty straightforward in how it works. Type in a search as you would normally do and if it is a search on a topic that has been fact checked, you will see a link below your search results with a source and if the fact is true, mostly true, mostly false or false.
If you want to check the validity of the facts, you can tap that link to go to the source and do your investigating on if it is really true or not. For their part, Google is trying to bubble up this information quickly & easily so you don’t have to do a lot of tapping around to check the facts of a story.
While having quickly become a punchline for many, fake news is a real problem. Countless bogus articles or ill-backed-with-facts articles have been making the rounds for years but as the number of
Google Search Fact Checking
sites that report news (in theory) have grown, so has the ever present demand to break news first. That, in turn, has created articles or sites that post articles that are marginally or fully not factually true.
The new feature isn’t perfect of course and Google was pretty open about this in their post about this new feature. Because of the shear amount of information out there, not every article will be fact checked. Likewise, an article can be fact checked by two different sources and they could reach two different conclusions on if it is real or not.
