Google gives up on data voids
The company once warned users when they might be seeing low-quality results — but weeks before the 2024 election, the feature was quietly turned off. Google quietly stopped showing warning banners that alerted users to potentially unreliable search results in the weeks leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, despite no obvious improvement in the quality of those results, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University.
Research Findings
The study, led by Ronald E. Robertson of Stanford and Evan Williams of Carnegie Mellon, analyzed 1.4 million search queries shared on social media from October 2023 to September 2024. The study focused on “search directives” — social media posts encouraging people to search for specific terms, a practice often used by people who are spreading conspiracy theories. By encouraging people to “do their own research,” and then directing them to obscure results for which there are few high-quality links, they can trade on the trust that people have in Google to spread misinformation.
History of Warning Banners
Beginning in 2022, Google began to show warning banners for some searches like this, which information researchers call “data voids.” Data voids are often exploited by actors seeking to spread misinformation on topics where little authoritative information is available. In the early 2020s, as part of an industrywide effort to add context to potentially wrong or harmful information, Google added banners about three kinds of data voids.
Changes in Warning Banners
The banners were shown relatively rarely: in about 1.5 percent of queries in the researchers’ March 2024 sample, the last before Google stopped showing the warnings. But when they were displayed, the banners often pointed out that results pointed to low-quality domains and conspiracy theories.
Google's Decision
The move was surprising, they wrote, given that elections so often generate conspiracy theories for which few high-quality results are available, or in which motivated actors quickly post pages filled with misinformation to support their political goals.
Call for Transparency
The researchers called for "greater transparency around Google's warning banners, their prevalence, and the effects that their presence or absence has on real users."
Google confirmed that it had discontinued the banners after finding that unspecified improvements to its core search engine had caused the warnings to trigger less often.
Impact of Changes
Moreover, they wrote, the quality of results for the searches in their sample had not meaningfully improved. “We found little evidence of substantive changes to the domain quality of the [search engine result pages] produced for queries that had previously received a low-quality banner,” they write.
Continual Battle
danah boyd noted that not all data voids are dangerous. But it’s important that platforms continue to take it seriously. “As with all security issues, there is no magical ‘fix’ — there is only a constantly evolving battle between a system’s owners and its adversaries,” boyd said.
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