Fighting COVID-19 Hoax, Google Launches Artificial Intelligence Tool That Filters Vaccine Search Results

Variation of the keyword coronavirus vaccine from the Google search engine (Google Blog)

JAKARTA - Like a holy war, that's what Google is trying to do against misinformation and hoaxes. And during this time of the pandemic, the war has only intensified, manifesting itself in various Google updates to its search engine service.

Starting from the restriction of information from unknown sources, to the addition of information boxes from health institutions and affixed to search engines. But in fact, misinformation – especially related to the corona virus and the Covid 19 vaccine, always finds loopholes and reaches readers.

Most recently, Google introduced MUM. It stands for Multitask Unified Model, a new Artificial Intelligence based tool developed by the company. And according to Google's claims, MUM can help search engines to answer the most complex sentences typed by users.

"By collecting information from more than 75 languages," said Google Fellow and Vice President Search Pandu Nayak via the company's official blog, Tuesday, June 29.

First introduced at the Google I/O developer conference last May, the company stated that it had MUM enabled. And his first work was to display information related to the corona virus vaccine.

According to the company's analysis, there are more than 800 variations of the coronavirus vaccine name. Such as “Pfizer Coronavirus” and “CoVaccine”. And all the variants were collected from various languages.

Identifying the name, as well as selecting the information box from each of these queries, is a process that usually takes “weeks”. However, according to the company's claims, MUM can do it in an instant. Just a few seconds!

Google has also validated the results of the MUM analysis and is considered accurate. So, the technology is now being tested on search engines.

"This first use of MUM helps you get important information from users from all over the world in a short time," said Pandu.

Google displays information from the CDC or the World Health Organization (WHO) in an information box. In addition, Google also stated that it will display information that comes from "local health authorities, depending on where you search".

Disseminating vaccine information is a small-scale example of some of the major changes the company is implementing to search engines. MUM also requires less input data to generate answers.

"Theoretically, the Google search engine can adapt faster to new trends and information," concluded Pandu.