Earlier this month there was a kerfuffle when journalists noticed that the top Google hit for "did the Holocaust happen"—a popular question, as it turns out—was, due to the vagaries of Google's own algorithms, a link to a grunting anti-Semitic neo-Nazi website offering readers about as much insight into that question as browsing the contents of a garbage can behind your worst local bar.

Prominently linking to a Holocaust-denying site was a problem for Google; they have long proudly declared that they don't edit or filter search results except in extreme cases (illegal content, virus links, etc.) and people being goddamn stupid on the internet is not, sadly, an extreme case.

On the other hand, Google is a search engine. Its goal is to provide users with useful, informative content. If the top hit to a basic factual question sends the reader off to uninformative, malevolent, or simply fraudulent responses then the Google algorithm is failing to do the key part of its job—the thing that keeps customers coming back to it. If you did a search for how does electricity work and the top hits were sites proclaiming electricity to be the unchained souls of wandering ghostly hippos then both the company's long-term future and Mr. Miller's eighth grade science class would both be in a world of hurt.

So after an initial round of insisting that the results were the results and they just couldn't help it if a neo-Nazi hate group peddling misinformation gains top search spots, Google is now patching its algorithm: