Even though the move doesn't necessarily eliminate fake news altogether, it will force "low quality" articles further down in the search results, thus making it much more difficult for users to locate.

According to Google, the decision to introduce the new algorithm was sparked by the 2016 presidential election, where the issue of so-called "fake news" was consistently debated on the national stage.

"It was not a large fraction of queries – only about a quarter percent of our traffic – they were the important queries," explained Ben Gomes, Google's vice president of engineering for search. "It's not a problem that is going to go all the way to zero, but we now think we can stay a step ahead of things."

The most recent victim of Google's fake news witch hunt has been the website Infowars, run by political radio host Alex Jones. Leaked documents from the Internet search giant reveal that employees were being instructed to rate articles and other posts from Infowars as "low" to "medium" quality, even if the information was entirely accurate.