Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai says his goal was to have no fake news distributed at all.  This is in response to growing concerns about loads of crap news stories that flooded social media and even showed up in Google's news algorithm before the US Presidential election. 

"It is important to remember that we get billions of queries every day," Mr. Pichai said in an interview with the BBC.  "There have been a couple of incidences where it has been pointed out and we didn't get it right.  And so it is a learning moment for us and we will definitely work to fix it."

The Google CEO admitted that fake news might have influenced some people's votes - and given the narrow margins between US President-elect Donald trump and Hillary Clinton, it might have affected the race.  Google and Facebook announced this week that they will take steps to restrict ads from sites that sites that "misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information", and therefore choke their revenue streams.

Before and after the election, both sites were infiltrated by pro-Trump fake news stories.  It's keeping the fact-checkers busy.

"At least half of all stories you read now are aggregated from other sites," said Brooke Binkowski of Snopes.com.  "People have lost a lot of trust from mainstream news," she added, noting that traffic to Snopes has spiked as people check to see if the nonsense they see on social media has been debunked.

Ms. Binkowski says that Google and Facebook are not going far enough to tackle the use of their platforms to flood bogus information into the minds of the unsuspecting:  "It's a Band-aid solution to a much deeper problem.

"I'm worried about that the problem isn't just fake news, but the mentality that breed people's belief in fake news," she said.  "There's the erosion and loss of credible media.  Many of the fake news sites are predicated on fear of the other."

Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai has responded to concerns about fake news stories, heightened since the US election.

Speaking to the BBC's Kamal Ahmed, he said the goal was to have no fake news distributed at all.