The problem can be traced back to a change Google made in October 2014 to include non-journalistic sites in the “In the News” box instead of pulling from Google News.

But one might have imagined that not every forum site could be included. The idea that 4chan would be within the universe that Google might scrape is horrifying.

Worse, when I asked Google about this, and indicated why I thought it was a severe problem, they sent back boilerplate.

Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries. 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.

It’s no longer good enough to note that something was algorithmically surfaced and then replaced. It’s no longer good enough to shrug off (“briefly,” “for a small number of queries”) the problems in the system simply because it has computers in the decision loop.

After I followed up with Google, they sent a more detailed response, which I cannot directly quote, but can describe. It was primarily an attempt to minimize the mistake Google had made, while acknowledging that they had made a mistake.

4chan results, they said, had not shown up for general searches about Las Vegas, but only for the name of the misidentified shooter. The reason the 4chan forum post showed up was that it was “fresh” and there were relatively few searches for the falsely accused man. Basically, the algorithms controlling what to show didn’t have a lot to go on, and when something new popped up as searches for the name were ramping up, it was happy to slot it as the first result.

The note further explained that what shows up in “In the News” derives from the “authoritativeness” of a site as well as the “freshness” of the content on it. And Google acknowledged they’d made a mistake in this case.

The thing is: This is a predictable problem. In fact, there is already a similar example in the extant record. After the Boston bombings, we saw a very similar “misinformation disaster.”

Gabe Rivera, who runs a tech-news service called Techmeme that uses humans and algorithms to identify important stories, addressed the problem in a tweet. Google, he said, couldn’t be asked to hand-sift all content but “they do have the resources to moderate the head,” i.e., the most important searches.

The truth is that machines need many examples to learn from. That’s something we know from all the current artificial-intelligence research. They’re not good at “one-shot” learning. But humans are very good at dealing with new and unexpected situations. Why are there not more humans inside Google who are tasked with basic information filtering? How can this not be part of the system, given that we know the machines will struggle with rare, breaking-news situations?