San Francisco: Alphabet Inc.’s Google has quietly decided to scrub an entire category of online content—personal medical records—from its search results, a departure from its typically hands-off approach to policing the web. Google lists the information it removes from its search results on its policy page. On Thursday, the website added the line: “confidential, personal medical records of private people.” A Google spokeswoman confirmed the changes do not affect search advertising but declined to comment further. The records were indexed in Google’s search results. Google has also recently adjusted its tightly-held search ranking system to filter misleading articles, or fake news, following criticism for hosting and promoting the content in results.

Source: Mint June 23, 2017 03:54 UTC