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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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Can we know this for sure? Has google confirmed it? What is the trustrank of newscientist.com ?
1. Google
2. Apple
3. Firefox
4. Your Rights are being stolen!
5. Microsoft sucks.
Rinse. Repeat.
I'll be fascinated to see how Slashdot articles get ranked.
Now for the gamespy implimentation to see what servers are filled with lamers... Now that'd be useful!
The basic ideas and principles of TrustRank:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000661.shtml
I can see dangers in this becoming an elitist thing though, i.e Trusted Sites only linking to other trusted sites, or creating perceptions in surfer's minds. It will be interested to see how Google develop this one, that's for sure.
Business Voyeur
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.
"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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foxnews.com just disappeared entirely from the Internet.
... didn't Al Franken write that book already?
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Did they copyright "TrustRank" or "TrustRank Beta"?
Too much work. It's just easier to do what Google tells me to do.
Given that ALL news sources or sites have some bias, isn't trust in the eye of the beholder in many cases? Although the objective facts of some situation may be undisputed (usually these are disputed, too), the interpretation of those facts is subjective and highly dependent on the viewpoint, world model, etc.
Perhaps Google will need to introduce right-wing and left-wing versions of TrustRank. If it does not, then it will be an example of tyranny of the majority when Google asserts than the majority's bias is trustworthy.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
There are two main ways of ranking news (as well as websites and whatnot): Popularity or Quality. Popularity can be easily quantified, but with news you will probably end up with big and well known media source dominating the ranking. Regardless of what one thinks about CNN or BBC, they are not what I look for in googlenews (or I would just type www.cnn.com). I want news sources that I was anware of, to give me a fresh perspective.
Quality on the other hand is very hard to measure, and any definition will surely be controversial. The metrics they are proposing will also benefit large well knwown news sources.
What I would really like though is a rank that gave the widest possible perspective. Some algorithm that would take a news event and define some broad categories of news sources (say, on news on Iraq, conservative american media, liberal american, iraqi, arab, etc.). Then one or two representatives of each category would be displayed in the ranks, choosen among the cotegory by the metrics described in the article. The trick of course is to define the categories, but I think one could do that by looking at how different sources 'cluster' together. Sources in one country link overwhelmingly among themselves rather than abroad. Conservative news sources tend to cite and link to other conservatives, ditto for liberals or any other category. This is even more true for blogs, which wouldn't be much cited in the rank itself, but are a sort of glue that binds ideological and national categories together, and thus provide useful information to help classify the news source.
I hope I'm making sense here. Just my 2cents...
IF author = 'Enderle' THEN TRUST=ZILCH AND BONEHEAD = 1.
IF author = 'DiDio' THEN TRUST=NADA AND MICROSOFT_SHILL = 1
IF topic = 'SCO' THEN RELEVENCE TO ANYONE = RELEVANCE TO ANYONE - 1000
IF quoted_source = 'Marc Andressen' THEN WHO_FUCKING_CARES = 1
IF news_organization = 'FOX' then BULLSHIT_IS_AFOOT = 1.
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.
How about over time Google learns which sites I trust and modifies the ranking according to that. We could give each site a thumbs up or down rating like you do on a TiVO.
I don't intend to substitute Googles validation for my common sense. But when I go to Google for news, and click on one of the top few stories on a particular topic, I want to have some expectation that I'm probably getting a reasonably trustworthy news source.
Currently I do this by scanning for one I've heard of. Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, hell, even Al Jazeera and CNN: All of these may have biases, but I have some idea what they are, and they can all be expected to try for accuracy about the basic facts.
For more obscure stories, this doesn't necessarily work. So I'm perfectly glad to hear Google will be making some attempt to weed out those "news" sources which, to put it kindly, do not try for accuracy about the basic facts.
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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