This year, many lawmakers have pressured Google to fix their results for when people search the term: “abortion clinics”. This comes after many pregnant women were presented with fake medical centers that didn’t provide any service at all when searching on the site.
The first warning came when the Supreme Court sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of AlphabetGoogle’s parent company, telling Google to change these search results.
Senator Mark Warner (VA.) and Representative Elissa Slotkin (MI.) also wrote the following in the letter: “Directing women toward fake clinics that traffic in misinformation and don’t provide comprehensive health services is dangerous to women’s health and undermines the integrity of Google’s search results,”. They argued that scamming women into fake abortion services is dangerous to their health and can ruin Google’s search result’s reputation as trustworthy.
Google’s search engine’s method of finding results works by looking at your search, location, nationality, age, and hundreds of other factors to find the most quality sources. However, this can be abused rather easily.
Kim Bellware, the journalist for an article in the Washington Post wrote: “11 percent of Google search results for abortion services led users to nonmedical facilities that don’t provide abortion; the result was 37 percent for Google Maps queries.”
According to the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, these “crisis medical abortion” clinics are completely legal, but they don’t show integrity and are unethical “by providing misleading information and causing delays and inequities in access to abortion.”
Article: Lawmakers urge google to fix abortion searches | Washington Post
The first warning came when the Supreme Court sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of AlphabetGoogle’s parent company, telling Google to change these search results.
Senator Mark Warner (VA.) and Representative Elissa Slotkin (MI.) also wrote the following in the letter: “Directing women toward fake clinics that traffic in misinformation and don’t provide comprehensive health services is dangerous to women’s health and undermines the integrity of Google’s search results,”. They argued that scamming women into fake abortion services is dangerous to their health and can ruin Google’s search result’s reputation as trustworthy.
Google’s search engine’s method of finding results works by looking at your search, location, nationality, age, and hundreds of other factors to find the most quality sources. However, this can be abused rather easily.
Kim Bellware, the journalist for an article in the Washington Post wrote: “11 percent of Google search results for abortion services led users to nonmedical facilities that don’t provide abortion; the result was 37 percent for Google Maps queries.”
According to the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, these “crisis medical abortion” clinics are completely legal, but they don’t show integrity and are unethical “by providing misleading information and causing delays and inequities in access to abortion.”
Article: Lawmakers urge google to fix abortion searches | Washington Post
