Never heard of it until now. A new effort to combat fake news, but it's not clear if, indeed, there was a big update:
Project Owl is an endeavor by Google to try to reduce the amount of fake news and hate speech from showing in its search results. The effort is supported primarily through user feedback with changes to a few of its search capabilities.
Good luck, Google! "Fake news" and "hate speech" is almost entirely labeled as such (or not) according to the rater's political stance on the left-right spectrum. Realistically, how many people do you know who are truly, consistently "objective" and who opinions are not colored by their deeply-held beliefs? I'd wager not many.
Google Owl is a three-pronged attack on fake news and problematic content on web. It also focuses upon improved Autocomplete suggestions in search query box.
"Google’s ‘Project Owl’ — a three-pronged attack on fake news & problematic contentGoogle’s ‘Project Owl’ — a three-pronged attack on fake news & problematic content" , source: https://searchengineland.com/googles-project-owl-attack-fake-news-273700
If print and television media is not biased; then I don't think that fake news would have arrived at all. The truth is that people nowadays more rely on Social media, Twitter and Quora for news than ever before.
With Project Owl, Google has made a number of changes to its ranking signals. It has also updated its Search Quality Rater guidelines. This means the people who evaluate and assess the quality of your Google search results have access to better standards. Evaluators will be able to make better judgements regarding when to flag webpages or remove search predictions.