Google pushes down Holocaust-denying search results, but only to the bottom of the first page

Google is punishing websites that peddle Holocaust denials — at least a little.

The search engine reportedly tweaked its algorithm so that the alt-right site Stormfront's post "Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn't happen" showed up at the bottom of the first page of search results for the query "Did the Holocaust happen?"

Stormfront's Holocaust-denying post was the first search result for that question earlier this month.

Digital Trends reported that the search result would disappear from Google entirely. A Google spokesperson told the site that the search engine would take action against "non-authoritative information" in its results.

But the Stormfront result was still on Google as of Tuesday.

Tech companies have been under pressure to take more responsibility for the information that shows up on their platforms. Facebook finally took steps this month to monitor the spread of propagandistic fake news on its platform. Google faced similar outcry when Stormfront topped its search results.

When Mashable searched "did the Holocaust happen" on Google, the Stormfront result appeared as the eighth option, at the bottom of the first page of results. Directly above the Stormfront result was the Wikipedia page for "Holocaust denial."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Another Holocaust denial appeared on Google's fourth page of search results, from the similar Daily Stormer.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

“Google was built on providing people with high-quality and authoritative results for their search queries,” a Google spokesperson told Digital Trends. “We strive to give users a breadth of diverse content from variety of sources and we’re committed to the principle of a free and open web. Judging which pages on the web best answer a query is a challenging problem and we don’t always get it right.”

These changes are better than a Holocaust denial in the very first Google result, to be sure, but the bottom of the first page is hardly banning or punishing sites that traffic in white supremacy and anti-Semitism.