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.'"

Comments

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[twbecker]

From what I have read about trust rank, the basic premise is that they pick 200 or so "trusted sites". The trust rank for any page is then basically the number of link hops to the page from a trusted site.

I was gonna mod you down, but I'll post instead. If you'd have RTFA, you'd have seen that the above statement is totally false. There are lots of criteria they are using to generate the number, of which internet traffic is only 1. To quote TFA:
he database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.