Googler Mor Schlesinger, who heads up the Climate and Crisis Response team, shares her insights.

What led you to your current role?

I was a serial entrepreneur, working in tech since I was 17, and was looking to create my next startup when someone at Google asked me to join the organization. I now lead the new Climate and Crisis Response teams within Search. It was clearly needed because people were coming to Google in the millions – people affected by floods, wildfires, and other climate crises – to find timely, helpful and actionable information. I joined because I wanted to impact society at large and Google offered the platform to do it at scale.

What’s the most innovative feature that you’ve worked on that has had the most impact on people?

Definitely SOS Alerts. It’s one of our most innovative products and a great example of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used to help people prepare ahead of a crisis and stay informed. The guiding principle of SOS Alerts is ‘expect the unexpected,’ because crisis events are so dynamic and unpredictable. So it can help people in the midst of natural disasters – from earthquakes, wildfires and floods – to man-made disasters such as war. So of course it’s very relevant to the situation in Ukraine, where SOS Alerts have provided accurate and timely information in the region.

How exactly does it help people?

In times of crisis, people need information to make life or death decisions within minutes. So people come to Google and tend to ask four fundamental questions, ‘What is happening?’ ‘Where is it happening?’ ‘What do we need to do?’ and ‘How can we help?’ We build our product to help with these questions, so we make it easy for people to get authoritative and locally relevant information to help them navigate the crisis.

What’s been the most significant moment in your career in Search so far?

There hasn’t really been a significant moment, it’s more a sense throughout my time here that I've been able to have, literally, a life saving impact on people. It really hit home when I was scanning through user feedback and I saw the words, “Thank you Google you saved my life!” I thought wow. It’s such a privilege to be able to help people – for a job. It’s so amazing!

Where was that person?

They were close to a shooting incident and didn’t know what was happening. They’d heard shots and saw people running, then they checked Google and found out that they needed to stay put and take cover.

Where do you see the biggest progress being made in tracking our changing environment in the next 3-5 years?

I think at the intersection between climate and crisis, which is basically climate change. And one thing we know about climate change is that we’re going to see more frequent and more severe natural disasters. Advances in artificial intelligence together with search mean we can give advance notifications to users in life-threatening situations and enable them to act. For example, if we think that you’re in danger of an earthquake, we can issue early warnings to all Android phones in the area. Studies show that if you get to people before a crisis, you have nine times more impact.

What excites you about the future of Search and the real-life impact it can have?

For me personally, I think it's the intersection between climate and technology. We can all do our individual parts to mitigate climate change, but I believe that it’s the largest crisis that we face as humanity. And when I think about how we can help in this huge effort globally, well, I feel privileged to take part.

Guy is lead product manager at the Journalist Studio, where he works on tools to support the work of journalists.

Tell us about your work in Search and how it helps journalists worldwide.

My team works on Google Trends andPinpoint, amongst other products that are still in incubation. All sit within theJournalist Studio, which is a collection of tools that help journalists to do their work more efficiently, creatively, and securely.

How is Google Trends helpful for journalists?

Being able to see what people are searching for gives an accurate insight into the topics of the day – or indeed month or year, spanning anything from sporting events and seasonal recipes to news stories and celebrity gossip. It’s therefore super useful to journalists, who use Google Trends a lot – to help them uncover new story ideas, or to complement their research and enhance their storytelling. Every year we share aYear In Search round up, and it’s hugely exciting for our team to see media around the world talking about the changing themes that are shown.

What problem does Pinpoint solve for journalists?

Reporters often have to spend a lot of time sifting through large collections of handwritten documents, images and audio recordings. This material can range from freedom of information requests, which can return hundreds of thousands of documents, to court hearing transcripts or police reports. Similarly, audio material can be lengthy interviews or weekly council meeting recordings and so on. Sometimes reporters know what they’re looking for and sometimes they have to skim thousands of pages or listen to hours of audio just to figure it out – and often with intense deadlines looming.

Using advanced AI, Pinpoint processes documents and images, and indexes them so users can search for keywords, or easily find names of people, places or organizations. Similarly, it transcribes audio recordings, turning them into searchable text. So for reporters, it’s taking a task that would have taken a few people weeks to achieve, and shrinking it into a task that they can do alone, and more accurately, in just a few hours. We’ve had incredible feedback from journalists across the globe about how Pinpoint is an amazing time saver.

Academic researchers and students also find Pinpoint useful and so we also allow them access too.

What’s been the most exciting part of working on Pinpoint?

The initial research was fascinating because it was quite a new world for our team. We spent a lot of time attending journalistic conferences, running user studies to hear about what they needed, paying attention not just to what they were saying but also to what they weren’t saying, to see if there were deeper needs that we could solve.

I was most excited about the immersion trips where the team spent two or three days in newsrooms around the world from early morning to evening. We saw everything from how they run their editorial meetings to how they make their coffee, their running jokes, and so on – really immersing ourselves into their professional life.

So it was about learning and distilling the huge breadth of their needs on the one hand, and exploring a broad set of Google’s technological capabilities on the other. Then bringing them together. It was really exciting to find the sweet spot of where those two intersected.

Matt Cooke, who heads up the Google News Lab, talks about how his team’s keeping it real in news and search.

First, can you tell us about the Google News Initiative and the work that your team does?

The Google News Initiative is the part of Google that works with journalists and entrepreneurs to drive innovation in news — from surfacing factual information to helping local publishers to digitize their content.

As part of that, the News Lab offers partnerships and training in 70 countries around the world to bring Google technology to journalists and news publishers. We want to help strengthen digital skills to help journalists verify sources, fact check and explore different forms of storytelling for audiences searching for accurate information.

Tell us about your background and what led to working at Google.

I worked for a number of years at BBC in various roles, including reporting from the East London multimedia newsroom in the build-up to the 2012 Olympic Games. We gave members of the audience access to small cameras, which got me thinking about the potential of digital storytelling. So when the opportunity came along at Google, I seized it! I’m coming up to my 10th anniversary here.

What tips can you give readers searching for credible news and information?

News comes to us in so many different ways and formats these days so it can sometimes be hard to tell what's authoritative and accurate. But there are tools available to help, and there are five things I would recommend when it comes to checking authenticity:

1. If you’ve stumbled across something surprising, check the source. The About This Result feature provides details about a website before you visit it, including its description, when it was first indexed and whether your connection to the site is secure.
2. If an image looks suspicious you can go toGoogle Images and do a reverse image search by clicking on the camera icon and dragging in your picture. An example of an obvious fake, that many will have seen and that recurs, is the shark swimming up a flooded street.
3. Again if a story is surprising, look at other news sources to see if they’re covering it too. If they’re not, that could give you some pause for thought. Stories on Google news have the option for ‘full coverage,’ which means you can see how others are reporting the same story.
4. We have something called theFact Check Explorer which allows you to type in a search term and then it shows you counterclaims and debunks of that theory by fact checking organisations.
5. Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View can all help you verify whether an image that you are seeing is from the reported location. This can be done by checking for shadows of, for example, mountains or nearby buildings on Street View, and by matching them up with Google Earth.

There are some amazing and painstaking examples of work from BBC Africa Eye with video verification. It shows that by combining digital tools with great journalism, you can get to the heart of what’s really going on.

How are you tackling deep fakes?

Technology evolves fast, but our engineering teams and trust and safety teams are working hard to make sure that our technology stays ahead of emerging threats, and we’re working closely with industry partners too to understand how they’re engaging with verification and misinformation. It’s an industry-wide effort.

Progress is being made, for example YouTube has something calledContent ID which allows organisations to detect their IP copyright and content.

How does Google make sure that organisations don’t game the algorithm?

We update the search algorithm thousands of times a year and work hard to make sure that the information people find is the most accurate, authoritative and relevant to what they’re looking for. We have policies in place to prevent spam and any deceptive practices — there’s more information here about how Search works. And I’d also add that we place a lot of importance on people finding good quality local news from reliable sources as well.

How do you make sure that search literacy isn’t confined to the few and privileged?

Over the last few years we’ve spent a lot of time with media literacy experts to provide newsroom style lessons for primary and secondary school students across the UK, a good example is Be Internet Legends which has reached over 70% of primary schools in England.

And there’s more that can be done outside the classroom. Last year, we contributed €25 million to the European Media and Information Fund, which supports funding for publishers, academics and researchers to research and implement media literacy.

What excites you about Search?

One of the things that my team works with is a tool calledGoogle Trends, which shows you anonymised, indexed data on what people are searching for across a given location or a given time.

We collaborate with broadcasters, journalists, academics and non-profits to see what emerging patterns and trends in search reveal. What’s really interesting is how changing questions reveal changing attitudes across time. It’s useful for journalists, or indeed anybody who’s interested, to see what preoccupations people have around major news events.

For example, if you're looking for the latest design trends, we can see that Search interest for 'japandi interior design' has increased by 973% in the last 12 months. Similarly, if you're wondering what people in the UK are reading, we can share that between 2017 and 2021, Search interest for books on neurodiversity has increased by 1280%.

What’s your most loved search feature that everybody should know about?

Some of the more Advanced Search features can really save time. So if you’re searching for information about an institution or a public figure, often you’ll have to wade through lots of information. If you want to delve deeper you can start to remove repetitive information, simply by putting a minus symbol in front of a word. For example, I travel a lot for work so if you’re looking for information about UK airports but you don’t want to focus on Heathrow you can type in ‘UK airports -Heathrow.’ It is simple, but saves lots of time!

On Google Street View, my favourite desktop tool is the little clock at the top of the screen. This allows you to go back in time so you can see how things have changed. For example, when Britain was getting ready to host the 2012 Olympic Games, you can see all the flags and banners up in central London. And where cities change fast, for example East London, you can see how new developments have taken the place of old buildings. Take a look!