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Google to use TrustRank for News, Possibly More
mike slaven writes "In a follow-up to Tuesday's post about Google registering a trademark on the term TrustRank, an article on NewScientist explains how Google plans to track the credibility of news sources. The article also mentions that the patent on TrustRank is not limited to ranking just news stories: 'The patent also reveals that the same system could be roped in to rank other search results, not simply news. So sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved.'"
The problem I have with this is that there are many problems with identifying trusted sites and maintaining the trustworthiness of such sites after they have been chosen.
From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites. The open directory projects seems to me to be a candidate for a trusted site. It has editorial controls and links to a heck of a lot of sites.
The first question to ask is: "After the trusted sites is chosen, how much would it cost to buy one?". I suppose dmoz itself would be hard to buy outright, but how much would it take to buy one of the editors, or to buy an editorial position? Probably not much. Dmoz alread has a lot of editorial fraud and it would make the problem worse. I'm not sure that its fair to expect trusted sites not to degrade to some extent.
The second question to ask is: "How hard is it to buy links from trusted sites?". The answer has to be that it is pretty easy. Forget about corrupting the people as I discussed in the last point. Any trusted site that links to lots of pages is going to have a huge link management problem. Every day hundreds of domains that it links to may expire. You can snap those up and buy trust.
All this doesn't even include folks who make sites look trustworthy with the sole intention of turning them to the dark side later. All of this happens currently with pagerank, but it will be much worse once the trust power is put into the hands of a few.
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I've never understood why Slashdot ever makes it on Google News. They rarely 'report' anything, just link to other articles.
Basically what they patented (from what I gather) is the idea of taking many factoids about a news company and putting it into a balanced formula to create a "trust" number.
However, they are not patenting the formula itself, but just the idea of using such a formula, it seems...
This seems like another case of taking an obvious idea and trying to block the competition by patenting it.
also forgot the occasional sco-bashing story.
"Trust, but verify." - Ronnie "Rayguns" Reagan
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The idea isn't exactly new...refereed and peer-reviewed professional journals have been doing something along these lines for decades. Google, as I read it, is attempting to apply some basic scholarly principles to their listings.
Now the bad news...I don't think it will work as described. Counting "number of bureaux cited" or hops from originator isn't exactly going to keep faked articles off their listings; as someone else already pointed out, it may be a matter of shucking out the cash for a domain that suddenly gets listed as "high trust level." Then that domain can be used to post pretty much whatever they want to make people think is accurate journalism.
Sorry...I like the concept of automating the tedious task of fact-checking, but until Google can get their clusters' AI well beyond the Turing-test phase, it's not going to happen. Humans will still need to examine articles and references and make decisions as to whether a particular submission is, in fact, valid and accurate.
Just my two cents' worth...save up the change for a root beer or something...
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Do you really need Google for this? Or is Google validation going to substitute for your own common sense?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
As long as the rankings are fair and handled in a responsible matter then Google stands to give consumers the power that they have lacked for a long time. Companies will take note that if their trust ranking suffers from bad consumer reports then they will begin to pay attention.
Maybe when you search for DSL you'll see companies at the top that deserve that ranking and the companies that fall down who think they should be first would improve how they treat their customers.
Peer pressure at it's finest.
So Google wants to be the web's authoritative source on what sites can be trusted? I don't think I like the sound of that. No one entity should have that job.
Ideally everyone would use common sense, but so few people have that anymore that it's almost quaint to suggest it.
Reblicans trust The Free Republic but distrust The Nation.
Democrates are exactly the opposite. What should TrustRank do about that? I don't see any way to reconcile stuff like that.
The internet provides us with such unlimited info that the problem is no longer finding information, it is deciding who to trust.
Everyone probably has some internal list of sources they trust, but maintaining such a list is very hard.
If TrustRank could be done and done right (???) then it would be a wonderful service.
But, can any corporation be trusted to do this? Surely they would eventually start to 'sell' higher trust ratings? I 'trust' google, but it is still a corporation and it's job is to make money.
Google is important because millions of people use it multiple times per day. Many people don't even type URLs into their browsers directly anymore... they just enter website names into the google toolbar or homepage.
So in short, knowing about what makes a #1 result a #1 result is critically important. We are moving from a phase where relevance & the work of hucksters looking for higher rankings drove search ranks to a new era, where "credibility" and political considerations will drive the results.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
There will be political implications of this new ranking system. I bet nobody has really thought this through...
What "trust rank" would you give Al Jazeera, for example?
It is a state-owned, but journalistically largely independent big satellite network with a lot of staff and a huge audience. Just from an area of the world that might have different views.
Isn't this behavior outside their mission statement? If Google's just going to be another patent farm and start using geniuses to come up with obvious ideas, I'd hardly call that not being evil . . . but that's just me.
I always paid attention to which news sites does the Google algorithm chooses to use as a primary source to a news item, and they are, more often than not, American sites. Anyway, news.google.com has been an useful source, since you can click on "all 1,777 related" and browse through the headlines and see the varying oppinions around the world. Example: this one was picked as a headline:
Bush Promotes New Plan for Social Security as Benefit to Young
In the other headlines, you see other views:
- Bush Speech Fuels Capitol Debate Over Social Security's Future
- Bush on offensive as ratings hit floor
- Bush Plan Would Cut Benefits
- Bush pitches plan to fix Social Security finances
- For first time, Bush backs benefit cuts to help bolster Social
...
- Bush vs. The Press
And from here you can read articles from the various dissenting views. To me, that's the main utility of news.google.com. I wonder if TrustRank is going to start favoring sites such as CNN... after all, they're "America's most trusted news source" (according to themselves, at least).In the end, nothing beats reading the news from a number of different news sources. Unfortunately, most people don't do that.
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