Google’s been under intense pressure to alter its results after it was found to be listing a Holocaust-denial site first for a search on “Did the Holocaust happen.” Now, that’s finally changing.
It’s not clear whether this is due to a change with Google in terms of its ranking algorithms for the efforts of external parties to influence the results. My bet is on the latter. Google has previously said that it wanted to address this and similarly egregious results but that the process would take time.
Currently, when searching on my iPad, I see that a page from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has moved to the top free listing, knocking a denial discussion forum page that had been there into second place.
I was not logged into Google, using incognito mode within Chrome, so my personal search history shouldn’t have been influencing this result.
On desktop, the older results (also in incognito mode) are still showing for me, as is the case with mobile results on my iPhone:
I suspect we’ll see what’s happening for me on the iPad begin to spread to other devices and for more people. It can often take time for ranking changes to move across the whole of Google, because of the many data centers it is using. But I’m not alone in seeing them:
Also as part of the change, a new site called Did The Holocaust Happen that was specifically designed to get into the rankings and take on the denial sites is showing up, appearing in position seven:
NOTE: This story is developing, and when I’m done updating, this line will disappear.
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