SAN FRANCISCO — Google said Thursday it was overhauling its search engine and maps app to make it easier for people to find abortion clinics, after criticism that the tech company was steering users toward crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortion rights.
News organizations have reported since at least 2018 and as recently as this month that Google was leading women seeking abortions astray with its search and map results.
Now, Google said it was making improvements to how it displays results and context, with labels that the company has verified such as “Provides abortions” or “Might not provide abortions.”
“We’re now rolling out an update that makes it easier for people to find places that offer the services they’ve searched for, or broaden their results to see more options,” the Bay Area-based company said in a statement.
“We get confirmation that places provide a particular service in a number of ways, including regularly calling businesses directly and working with authoritative data sources,” Google said. “We followed our standard testing and evaluation process to confirm that these updates are more helpful for people.”
The update is part of a wide response in Silicon Valley to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal in June of the Roe v. Wade ruling that had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.
Last month, Google and Yelp disabled the ability to post reviews for some crisis pregnancy centers, and Google said it would work to quickly delete location history for people going to abortion providers.
Privacy advocates are concerned about the ability of police to sweep Google searches and other resources to find information about people who may have sought an abortion, and more than 650 employees at Google and its parent company Alphabet have petitioned for better protection for users.
The latest Google overhaul covers not just clinics with abortion services but also other health care providers, such as places to get vaccines or veterans care, the company said. It said it had worked on the update for “many months.”
There will not be a specific label for crisis pregnancy centers, Google said, and the label “Might not provide abortions” could appear on a variety of different nonabortion providers.
If there is no abortion clinic nearby when a person searches for one, they will see a message that says there are no relevant places nearby and an option to “search farther away,” Google said.
About a dozen states have banned abortion in the two months since a conservative majority on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, according to an NBC News tally.