YouTube rolled out the changes on Wednesday night, accelerating its existing plans to tweak the search engine. The update targets search results about major news events -- including the NFL protests -- and is designed to keep inaccurate videos at bay. The company didn't provide details about how it defines "authoritative" sources, The WSJ says.

Google and Facebook both scrambled to fix their own news algorithms this week after promoting troll threads and false stories about the Las Vegas shooting.

"Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries," Google said in a statement. "Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we'll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future."