NewScientist (28 February 2015 ) publishes Hal Hodson’s “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links” (print: “Nothing but the truth”):
Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.
A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.
The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.
I must be paranoid, because all I can see here is potential for abuse: gaming the system, er, vault, so that your truth is its occupant; infiltration of Google’s employee base by folks who want to make sure the vault has the proper truth; “tweaks” by Google executives and low-level employees; database rot – .01% error rate in the database still implies millions of fallacious “facts”.
Not to mention the lawsuits. Oh, the lawsuits! I’ll have to check with a lawyer or two of my acquaintance and get their thoughts on the matter. And then government interference, both here and overseas, as certain uncomfortable facts make their way into the vault.
