Search engine Google has joined the global war against terror. In a pilot project announced on Tuesday, the website will provide anti-radicalisation results to whoever runs a search using keywords related to extremism. The Internet giant said that people at the risk of radicalisation will be shown links that are the exact opposite of what they searched for.

Senior Google executive Dr Anthony House said the company was working on two “counter-narrative” programmes as part of its efforts to fight terrorism. “One is to make sure these types of views are more discoverable. The other is to make sure when people put potentially damaging search terms into our search engine, they also find these counter narratives.”

Governments and other agencies have highlighted the need to fight the spread of extremism online, including propaganda videos circulated by the Islamic State. Dr House added that Google had taken down as many as 14 million videos from YouTube in 2014 for several reasons, including containing terrorist content.