Google has been dragged into the controversy over fake online news in the wake of last week’s US presidential election, adding to Silicon Valley’s discomfort over allegations that it may have played a role in tipping the vote.

上周美国总统选举之后，谷歌(Google)因虚假的网上新闻而被拖入一场争议。这件事使得硅谷在面对外界的有关指控——即指控其可能助推了选情的逆转——时感到更加尴尬。

The internet search engine was forced on Monday to admit its algorithms had failed by giving top placement in its results to a rightwing blog that claimed, inaccurately, that Donald Trump had won more votes than Hillary Clinton.

这家互联网搜索引擎公司周一被迫承认其算法出了问题，将一家不准确地声称唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)赢得的普选票比希拉里•克林顿(Hillary Clinton)多的右翼博客网站，放到了其搜索结果中排名最靠前的位置。

Google also said it was close to putting in place a new policy designed to prevent its Adsense system placing adverts on sites that carry fake news, something that might have helped to fund the spread of deliberate falsehoods ahead of the election.

谷歌还表示，它很快将实施一项新政策，以阻止其Adsense系统在带有假新闻的网站上投放广告——这种投放可能帮助为选前故意编造的谎言的传播提供了资金。

The embarrassment for the world’s biggest internet company followed criticism of Facebook in recent days for not weeding out fake news that spread widely on its social network ahead of the election. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook chief executive, has rejected the criticism, arguing that only a small mount of the election information shared over Facebook was fake. However, he also conceded that distinguishing the truth was “complicated”.

在全球最大互联网公司遭遇这一尴尬之前，Facebook也因未能在选前清理掉其社交网络中广泛传播的假新闻而在最近几天遭遇批评。Facebook首席执行官马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)驳斥了这些批评，称Facebook上分享的选举信息只有一小部分是虚假的。但他同时也承认甄别真相很“复杂”。

The spotlight shifted to Google on Monday after it gave prominence in its search rankings to a report on a blog site called 70News, which claimed that Mr Trump had won the popular vote during the election. According to the latest figures, reported separately by Google’s search engine, Mrs Clinton was more than 700,000 votes ahead late on Monday.

谷歌在周一引起人们的注意，是因为它在其搜索结果排名中，将一个名为70News的博客网站的一则报告置于显著位置。该报告声称，特朗普在选举期间赢得的普选民票更多。而根据谷歌搜索引擎另外报出的最新数字，周一晚之前希拉里赢得普选票比特朗普多70万张。

In a note added later to the blog site, the author of the report said: “Update: Anyone asking where I got the figures, it was from twitter posts.”

在70News网站后来添加的注释中，该报告的作者表示：“更新：致问我数字来源的人，它们来自Twitter上的帖子。”

Early in the day, the 70News post was given top billing under the “In the news” banner in Google’s search engine in response to the query “final election results”. It was still in second place by early evening, directly under a report from the Washington Post debunking the post.

当天早上，在谷歌搜索引擎针对“final election results”(最终选举结果)关键词给出的搜索结果中，70News网站这个帖子出现在最高位置，并打上了“In the news”(新闻报道)标签。而在当天傍晚，该帖仍被置于第二位，就在《华盛顿邮报》(Washington Post)批驳该帖的报道之下。

Google said its goal was to produce “the most relevant and useful results”, and added: “In this case we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms.”

谷歌表示它的目标是生成“最相关、最有用的结果”，并称：“就这件事而言，我们显然做得不对，但我们在不断努力改进我们的算法。”

The company does not override its algorithms manually for fear of being accused of bias, and instead tries to adapt its search ranking techniques to prevent the same problem arising again.

由于担心被控带有偏见，谷歌对其算法给出的结果不作人工修改，而是尝试调整其搜索排名技术，以避免再次发生同类问题。