Google Wants To Rank Websites Based On Facts Not Links

wabrandsma writes about Google's new system for ranking the truthfulness of a webpage. "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. 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. 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."

Comments

YES

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time, but I really hope their 'factual accuracy' engine gets open sourced so we can be clear on exactly how they determine what are 'facts'

Re:YES

[TapeCutter]

"Fact" engines such as Watson normally produce several results (facts) with a confidence rating on each and can show their "reasoning" step by step. The step by step reasoning is much more useful as a confirmation method than the source code. Source code won't help you much unless you have a solid background in statistical analysis.

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

Google sole arbiter of truth. Just what I need an MIC/advertisement company will define what is and isnt truth for me.

Re:YES

[ShanghaiBill]

It's about time

Yes, automated groupthink is a wonderful idea. Doubleplusgood!

Re:YES

[StevenMaurer]

Google sole arbiter of truth. Just what I need an MIC/advertisement company will define what is and isnt truth for me.

I trust google over random Anonymous Cowards pulling "facts" out of their ass, especially in political discussions. But, you can always choose to not use google. There are other search engines, you know.

Re:YES

[lgw]

DuckDuckGo has ranted for a while about Google's "search bubble", where it shows each user pages likely to confirm their biases. This twists that old habit, so now everyone will be presented with pages likely to confirm Google's biases. Disagree with the Google groupthink? Your page is filled with lies, and Google will do its best to hide it.

Your own good judgment is the only worthwhile filter, and you don't get or maintain that by seeing only pages that all say the same thing. You don't really understand any subject until you can argue both sides in detail, and see why those with the out-of-favor view believe what they do!

I don't expect it will take very many years before Google picks sides on politically contentious issues in their ranking. Is abortion murder? Don't worry, Google will decide for you! Is recycling actually helping the environment? Don't worry, Google will decide for you! Are the current Net Neutrality changes actually good for the consumer, or only for internet giants? Don't worry, Google knows where the facts are!

Whatever you do, don't spend the time to study issues in depth for yourself, no, don't rise above your station. Repeat what you've been told, and everyone will say how smart you are - well, at least everyone who shows up in a Google search.

Re: YES

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a nice idea but not everything on the internet relies on truth. I don't think sites based around satirical comedy or similar ideas will appreciate it (goodbye urban dictionary). Also what would google decide for topics that are actively contested such as religion?

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

yep definitely, search result quality imho has decreased significantly. I suspect its intentional and the purpose is to force me into personalization. I never search while logged into a google service and I don't intend to. And really the point of my comments is not to gather some cult of personality around myself so that I can be a "thought leader" whatever that bullshit phrase actually means.

Re:YES

[penguinoid]

It's about time, but I really hope their 'factual accuracy' engine gets open sourced so we can be clear on exactly how they determine what are 'facts'

They pretty much said their algorithm is "the internet said it, so it must be true". I hope they at least have some sort of weighting system to give experts more credibility on the subject of their expertise, rather than ranking everyone equally. Also hope the fact-checking bot is smarter than ALICE.

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts...

If facts are what is stated by the majority, then all ground breaking science is de facto, not factual.

This is sort of scary.

Majority driven "truth"?

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

terrible idea. cholesterol is good for us, right? but sites with this info would have ended up in the vault a mere 5 years ago
who watches the watchers?

Re:YES

[ripvlan]

FACT: This will help civilization improve. FACT!

Peace out, dude.

Re:YES

[ilsaloving]

It's already been demonstrated that when people believe a given thing, they will go out of their way to *continue* believing that thing. Even if you show them an overwhelming amount of evidence that they are wrong, rather than convincing them to change their opinion, they will instead double-down on their existing belief.

Combine that with the fact that there is a ridiculous amount of crap out there, from 'vaccines cause autism' idiots to Fox News, we *need* some kind of filtering to eliminate the nonsense that is put up there with the explicit purpose of misinforming people.

The only concern against something like this, is how easily/likely it would be for governments to subvert for pushing propoganda.

Of course, the end result will probably be that people stop using Google, cause being able to confirm their bias is far more important to people than the search engine they use.

Re:YES

[jellomizer]

Well there is danger, as some "facts" are politically motivated.
Liberal values, tend to see things as dangerous. The dangers of GMO food (While there is so proven science to show otherwise), Chemical whatever when used in a consumer good must be bad, because if you drink it in raw form you will die...

Conservative values, tend to lead to things being safe, Global Warming is not caused by Humans, The chemicals that we pump into your water supply is safe.

Points evidence or lack of evidence is often explained as a conspiracy by their opponents to keep the truth away from us. (Sometimes this is true, smoking, lead, etc...) Other times it is just hoping it isn't the case and delaying the process until real evidence comes out.

Especially if it is rather new, much of the science is just in the hypothesis state, and probably just started recording data. There isn't facts, but a lot of opinions, worded as fact.

Now Google as an institution is left leaning. While their intentions may be good and not trying to push a political agenda, their algorithm will closely match what how their brains would match facts vs bluster, thus creating a subconscious autonomous political leaning system.

Re:YES

[TheWitness]

Can someone place me on a suicide watch list.... cause this group think crap is going to ruin a good thing and drive me to drugs and alcohol which are now legal in my state. Wait... drugs and alcohol. Never mind the suicide watch list, I'll just self medicate to prevent the madness. Then I won't care. Wait, I drink city water. Never mind the medication then, I'm getting enough from my own cities water system. Everything is just fine and splendid.... nothing to see here. TheWitness

Re:YES

[Gallomimia]

This would have been great back when google was inventing the relational search engine. But now that the corporation has thrown in its hat with the regulating bodies of the real world, I can only predict that google will become the ultimate censor, finally cementing Orwell's Minsitry of Truth in the virtual world.

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

I trust google

There's your problem!

Re:YES

[Vintermann]

Well, Google's fact engine has a long way to go. If they start downranking thing that aren't "facts", Wikipedia just got a lot more power... I wanted to find out how high Denmark's highest hill is, and Google gave me a number, but it also said it was a giant flaming mountain of doom. They had that from the wikipedia page, of course, but they still presented it in their factbox.

So I expect Google will start downranking flaming mountain of doom-denialists.

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

All three of your examples are value judgments, not facts.

Is abortion murder? Depends on your definition of "murder", obviously, and that's necessarily based on a value judgment, not derivable from facts. Is recycling helping the environment? Depends on what you mean by "helping" (and "the environment" for that matter). Is net neutrality good for the consumer? Depends who the consumer is, and what you consider "good", which is two value judgments for the price of one.

Google has smart staff. I trust some of them to have at least read the Wikipedia page on the "is/ought problem".

Re:YES

[lgw]

All three of your examples are value judgments, not facts.

Yes, that was rather my point, really. But to some people they are "facts", and important facts to prevent anyone from having a "non-factual" view on! Given Google's history of censorship, it wouldn't surprise me to see their own bias creep in as to what sort of thing is a fact.

Re:YES

[Anonymous Coward]

It's desirable/possible to build your own Google type search engine http://www.nagaiah.com/google.html

Bad move

[Whiteox]

That WILL be a bad move. There are a lot of facts out there that academics still debate over. Pretty much anti-free speech afaic.

Re: Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. We still need to know "the other side of a story" regardless how strong gov or media try to make us into believing it. Would the fact-based ranking diminish those info?

Re:Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the GP is right. There are some people who disagree with facts, but that doesn't change the fact that the facts are facts.

You are an example of such a person. The GP made a factual statement, but you chose to disagree with it. That doesn't change the fact that the GP was completely correct, and you are completely wrong. The facts remain facts, regardless of what your opinion may be.

Re:Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of system would devolve into a boolean truth sort of system. However systems like that fail to do things like this properly.

This statement is false.

The problem is the 'fact' is both true and false at the same time. Or what would be called a trinary system. You can also construct logical fallacies very easily. People drown in water therefor water is deadly do not touch it.

It is not an 'impossible' problem. But will be quite difficult to crack.

Their current system works very well but is easily gamed. The thing is overall long term it is correct but on the short term it can be wildly wrong. It is correct on the long term as scammers tend to move onto other targets once something is 'mined out'.

Re: Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick question, websites that are deeply religious and contain thousands of, "there is a God," "and God said, let there..." Do these things get knocked way down or are those actual facts, or is there going to be a special clause for religion?

There are thousands of things people will swear are "facts" but it may not actually be the case.

Not only that but facts are different depending on who you ask. Example: "Palestine is a country that borders..." Wait a second, which countries/governments agree that Palestine is a country and which don't? (I actually don't know but just used that as an example, there are many examples of this.)

There are a million monkey wrenches that can jam this supposed system.

Re:Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of system would devolve into a boolean truth sort of system. However systems like that fail to do things like this properly.

This statement is false.

The problem is the 'fact' is both true and false at the same time.

The statement you gave as an example is logically true. Whereas we might disagree on the truth of the statement, there is no requirement for mutual agreement between logical value and agreement value.

Re: Bad move

[Whiteox]

You have made a great point. A major point.
Firstly, if implemented, it affects the ranking of a (e.g.) pseudo-science website. It shouldn't hopefully cut it out.
Let's keep real though:
$10,000 network cables for hi fi systems? That's pseudo science.
Any website that mentions 'Turanean' is now pseudo science -even though at one point in time it was an academically acceptable term.
There are a million+ monkey wrenches.
If I write a blog on Atlantean or review a book written by a pseudo-scolar, how does my ranking change? Will it eventually fall off the end and we'll be denied (as far as Google is concerned), fair ranking?
Also, what about free speech? How do "Women against Feminism" rank as it can be argued that it is not politically correct? How does an algorithm cater for all the nuances? What about Stormfront or any site that attacks political correctness?
What if the atheists take control? Where else can I find treatise on Fire Temples and Zoroastrianism?
Someone wrote once "From little bird turds do big ones grow." and I think that is the wedge here. Once you do that, you start losing access to information. And it is sooo easy to drive that wedge harder.
From that we can ask the question if Google has the right to be the world guide in ethics, morality, philosophy and cosmology. About a year or so ago, I have started using different search engines with improved results. Having another language helps too.

Re:Bad move

[hey!]

It is seldom the veracity of facts that the debate is over; it is their significance. But that happens to be where this falls idea falls short, because misinterpretation of facts is where the most potent misinformation comes from.

Case in point, "vaccine injury" -- which is a real thing, albeit very rare. Anti-vaccine activists point to the growing volume of awards made by the US "Vaccine Court" (more accurately called "The Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims") as proof that vaccine injuries are on the rise.

It is a verifiable fact that the volume of awards has grown since the early years of the program. That is absolutely and unquestionably true. However, that this is proof vaccine injuries is gross misinterpretation, because the "Vaccine Court" program is no fault. You don't actually have to show the defendant *caused* an "injury", you only have to (a) show the child got sick after being vaccinated and (b) find a doctor to sign off on a medical theory by which the child's illness *might* have been caused by the vaccination.

Since you don't have to actually prove injury in "Vaccine Court", the rise in cases and awards doesn't know vaccine injuries are on the rise. All that is necessary is that more people think that their child's illness was caused by vaccinations, and the low burden of proof will automatically ensure more awards.

And so there you have it. A perfectly factual claim can be cited in a way that leads people to preposterous conclusions.

Re: Bad move

[sectokia]

I think you are over analyzing it. Google know most people are searching for facts. If you debunk pseudo science, your page will probably rank the highest when searching for that pseudo science, at least that seems to be the intention.

Re:Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

Never been to an AGW thread, huh?

Re: Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Liberapedia would all but vanish in a puff of rational logic, so you'd get no irrational claims to oppose most facts.

FTFY

Re: Bad move

[alvinrod]

Well "and God said . . ." occurs in book X of the Bible which is a fact. Much like any quote can be a fact in and of itself, even if the content of the quote is of dubious truthfulness or outright incorrect. Never mind websites that are designed around debunking myths or other incorrect information which is contained on the page as a matter of reference.

This is a difficult problem to solve and there are a lot of edge cases that need to be considered to avoid poor rankings.

Re: Bad move

[pjt33]

Any website that mentions 'Turanean' is now pseudo science -even though at one point in time it was an academically acceptable term.

I've never heard the word before, but based on the first couple of pages of Google results I think you need to qualify it a bit, because it seems to be quite heavily used as a geographical descriptor in describing the range of plants and animals. (I'm assuming that's not the usage which you think is pseudoscience, but I could be wrong).

Re: Bad move

[Whiteox]

Sorry... spelled it wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Bad move

[gordo3000]

actually, on the point of zoroastrianism and fire temples,
I think this could make google so much more useful. If I want to see the research (I mean real research) on human reaction to mercury , and maybe any studies or abstracts about it, I can't really use google now. The first 200 website are anti vaccine websites. Instead I use something like wikipedia and work my way toward some research from the citations, and then use those base studies to scan for references that cite it (or the other way).

some things would be nice to sift facts from pseudo bullshit that spreads like wildfire.

Re: Bad move

[Whiteox]

Understood. I don't like to criticize without providing an alternative. I wonder how we can fix this?
My first thoughts are to group similar sites aggregating in the results - eg 'mercury anti-vaccine - (2549 results)' , 'mercury-health - (1024)', 'mercury-chemistry - (3230)', 'mercury-medicinal (4349)' ~ which you can click through to what you need.
Maybe using the new top level domains to refine the search?
I do miss the ability to add qualifiers in Google like mercury - 'vaccine' which restricts results to all mercury except vaccine.
I've found different sets of results using Yandex btw. I also have access to online uni libraries which helps a lot, but that is a closed system in itself by methodology. Can't find any fringe related material there....
You see, paradigm change results from evidence that doesn't fit a theory. If it gets harder to find fringe evidence, you tend to lock an existing theory into place. No advancement, no forward movement.

Re: Bad move

[gordo3000]

really would probably be easier to just do "traditional pagerank search" or "fact rank search". Looking at both would give a nice spread of information, and shouldn't be too hard to manage. or, as you said, bring back the damn qualifiers. Those made life much easier.

I think one issue is that most websites that posit fringe theories don't posit any evidence at all. It isn't like there is a climate change denying website that posts ocean temperature data and land data along with relevant analysis that shows the current analysis is wrong when looking at a different data set. But when I do search about climate change, I would love for websites that walk you through the current data and how it is analyzed, without all the "hockey stick" pseudo controversy.

And of course, we assume google is trying to be some great arbiter. Instead, it is trying to get the information it's users are looking for to the top of a search result. I certainly hope people doing real research don't use google for data gathering. There are proper journals and forums for that. But me, as a non-professional with a random interest, don't know any of that.

Re: Bad move

[silentcoder]

Does that even exist ?
Lifelong liberal and I have never been there nor heard of it.

So assuming it does, it doesn't actually matter if a site filled with complete bullshit (but with a leftwing slant) actually dissapears since nobody was using it anyway.

Re:Bad move

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Most people would be call the conclusion people are drawing from the settlement rate also a fact.

Re:Bad move

[hey!]

Sure, but they can call a piece of overcooked spaghetti a "bungie cord" and go jump off a bridge, as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Bad move

[JackieBrown]

If I want to see the research (I mean real research) on human reaction to mercury , and maybe any studies or abstracts about it, I can't really use Google now. The first 200 website are anti vaccine websites.

It must have something to do with the type of searches you have preformed in the past.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...

Granted, I only look at the first page of results, but non of them had anything to do with anti vaccination.

I really don't get how people don't find this scary. What if the next CEO decides global warming is a hoax or that the earth is flat? Do you think the current Google will find websites that complain about Google's stance on privacy factual?

I quit using google a few days ago after reading one of the slashdot articles on alternative web searches and this makes me even more glad I did.

Re:Bad move

[Actually, I do RTFA]

My point is only that Google will rank conclusions for "truth" as well as more objective facts.

Re:Bad move

[GuB-42]

I didn't read the paper but I think that big debatable facts ("global warming is caused by humans", "vaccines cause autism") won't count as much as small unquestionable facts ("Barrack Obama is the president of the USA", "A marathon is 42.195 km").

For example :
site 1 : cell phone radiations are bad for your health because ... plenty of true facts
site 2 : cell phone radiations are not a problem because ... plenty of true facts
Because both sites are full of unquestionably true facts (such as frequencies, laws, city populations, etc...) yet they disagree on some point, the point will be probably marked as "debatable" and will be of a lesser importance.

I also don't think "truth" will be reduced to academic truth. The goal here is to evaluate the quality of a website, not promote some kind of universal truth. For example, religious sites opposing well established scientific principles but correctly citing sacred texts and correctly identifying church leaders will be marked as high quality, whereas a site more inline with mainstream science but full of small mistakes (ex: "the earth diameter is 6371 km") will go down.

Re:Bad move

[Chalnoth]

It generally doesn't work this way. Websites that claim vaccines are bad, or global warming is a hoax, or cell phones cause cancer, are typically littered with large numbers of easily-checkable factual errors. As long as the corpus on easily-verifiable facts is large enough, Google will almost certainly have little problem eliminating most of the bogus claims, even politically-controversial ones, from the top of its rankings.

Re: Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite sure that the sole reason is to lower the ranking for http://wattsupwiththat.com/

Which is in error of course - that website has more actual science than all propaganda websites put together. I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago, and now I'm going to move away from Google's services completely.

Re: Bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

http://liberapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

I know you're a lifelong liberal, so for future reference, let me introduce you to something called google: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=liberapedia

can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[youn]

It is an interesting algorithm, but who is to say the fact is correct? if many sites say the same information, the fact is more correct? if that is the case, then how much better is that from links. when there is more than one version of the truth (conflicts, spin vs fact)... plus not all information is facts... philosophical questions may have more than one answer etc... so I am definitely curious to see how this works out

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

fact:

noun

a thing that is indisputably the case.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understood, it's similar to PageRank, but instead of more links to you = better rank, it's more like defends popular data = better rank. Pages that defend X for a popular X will go up, and those who defend not X will go down.
It will probably make things harder for the minority, but it's better for the majority. Expect to have to use even more -X with your queries.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to see how it works on Slashdot...

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Pope Hagbard]

Anecdotally, I never share links directly to here because summaries and headlines are so often wrong.

Re: can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

According to that definition, facts are exceedingly rare.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[sumdumass]

Not in science. A fact is an observation or evidence that has been repeatedly observed to be true. It doesn't mean always true or only true.

The problem is when existing theories compete. OR more precisely points within large theories compete. Take relativity for instance, gravitational waves help explain the big bang but not all observations support the big bang model. But gravitational waves are considered fact for the purpose of the theory even though it has never been directly observed because it can be explained in mathematical computations that explain observations.

So what happens when we actually detect them for real and they operate slightly different than we think? Does this new observation or fact get pushed to the front of the line or is it buried because the fact engine hasn't updated yet or the wikipedia article it is referencing is in a mod battle. How about if something else is found to explain the theory concerning gravitational waves but lives in the same limbo as gravitational waves in which it hasn't been directly observed but can explain observations with math also.

It reminds me in the 80's when (and I forget who) some doctor was claiming most stomach ulcers were the result of bacteria. Turns out that is a fact but he was originally ridiculed because the fact at the time was that no one believed that bacteria could survive in the stomach's acidic environment longer than it takes to pass through it. Now the fact is that it's cheaper to just giving a couple antibiotics and seeing if the ulcer disappears than to test if the ulcer is bacteria related or other. But it was indisputable at one time, then someone disputed it and now it is indisputable again. Facts change.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[circletimessquare]

that's a valid complaint

some scientific discoveries go against conventional wisdom and are originally ridiculed. for example, some australian scientists discovered stomach ulcers are caused by a certain species of bacteria in the 1980s. they were rejected, laughed at, people got angry at them. the belief at the time was acid and spicy food formed ulcers. wrong. eventually they won the nobel prize for medicine for their discovery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

but this process is mediated by serious researchers who, adhering to the scientific method, are compelled to reverse themselves in spite of their preliminary reactions

meanwhile, we have antivaxxers, moon landing deniers, GM food ignorance, creationists, climate change deniers, fluoride fearmongers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists babbling about burning airplane fuel and steel, etc... assorted douchebag crackpots who are absolutely, undeniably factually wrong, and oftentimes dangerous (to public health, for example), but enthusiastically keep spreading their lies nonetheless

stupid shitbags like this for example are working very, very hard to kill children:

http://njvaccinationchoice.org...

not they they understand their efforts only work to kill children: they're ignorant braindead assholes, pridefully arrogant in their lack of education

so they need to be shut down in other ways. your freedom to be a moron ends when your beliefs put my life and liberty in danger. so thank you, google

google's algorithm would downplay revolutionary new scientific evidence, like the ulcer causing bacterium, indeed. but this is a short time period, squarely in the realm of brand new scientific research, where, after enough weight, change would come quickly, and so to google's algorithm, if it gets its signals from solid peer reviewed journals that present genuine science

meanwhile, lies and idiocy are not peer reviewed and grow like fungus in the dark and will never, ever change

so they need to be buried at the bottom of google as the brain numbing, sometimes genuinely dangerous puerile prideful ignorance they are

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Harlequin80]

The stomach ulcer thing was two Australia scientists, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. They claimed, in 1982, that stomach ulcers were caused by H. Pylori but because that bacteria was common in the intestinal tract already the idea was shot down as incorrect. They spent 2 years trying to infect piglets with it then gave up and Barry drank a full petrie dish of the cultured bacteria. He suffered symptoms within 3 days, and had significant ulcers and gastritis after a week.

As a result of this test and the observed symptoms the medical community accepted their findings. They were awarded a nobel prize, in '96 I think.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

" similar to PageRank, but instead of more links to you = better rank"

  That's an oversimplification. The algorithm also factors page quality, layout, reputation, and authoritativeness to decide which pages rank higher for any given query, for each given users location. Just having other pages link to any given page doesn't give a higher rank without the aforementioned factors covered.

https://support.google.com/web... pretty much covers all the requirements to get a high ranking for a given query.

posted anonymously for a reason.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Oligonicella]

Since you decided to be a stickler with the definition:

First, bacteria not being the cause of ulcers wasn't indisputable, it *was* disputed, as you pointed out. It's just that the consensus was that bacteria weren't the cause. The consensus changed, not the fact that bacteria caused the ulcers.

By the way, Webster's for indisputable: "impossible to question or doubt : not disputable".

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[teslabox]

meanwhile, we have antivaxxers, moon landing deniers, GM food ignorance, creationists, climate change deniers, fluoride fearmongers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists babbling about burning airplane fuel and steel, etc... assorted douchebag crackpots who are absolutely, undeniably factually wrong, and oftentimes dangerous (to public health, for example), but enthusiastically keep spreading their lies nonetheless

stupid shitbags like this for example are working very, very hard to kill children:

Then you have official misinformation like this site, which is put together by the American Heart Attack Association:
  www. goredforwomen .org/

The American Heart Attack Association tells us that it is important to consume biodiesel instead of humanity's traditional fats (butter, tallow, lard, coconut oil). Official Science refers to nutritional biodiesel as the Omega-3 and Omega-6 "essential" fatty acids, but they always neglect to tell us how much "essential" fat is enough to meet our daily requirements for biodiesel.

Science has two faces: discovery, and product development. Wall Street doesn't care about facts, it just uses the trappings of science to sell defective products.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[camg188]

It would be interesting how it would rank the various contradictory claimed facts related to cases like Michael Brown/Ferguson MO.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Strangely Familiar]

The Google policy is about facts, not things. Facts are representations about things. Actual things, for example, cannot be true or false, they just are. Facts which represent properties of those things can be true or false. The Empire State Building is a particular thing. It is not true or false. "The Empire State Building is painted red" is a false fact about that particular thing. So, before anybody said, "H. pylori cause ulcers" it did not exist as a fact, only a thing. Remember, a fact is a representation, not to be confused with the thing it represents. False facts about the cause of ulcers existed. Few knew them to be false, except for the two Australians. The point that the GP was making was that Google doesn't deal in things, it deals in representations (web sites) about representations (other web sites). It doesn't do experiments on people to see if bacteria acutally cause ulcers; it relies on other peoples' representations about that. So when you say, "The concensus changed, not the fact that bacteria caused the ulcers." you are not correct, because there was no previous representation that h. pylori bacteria caused ulcers, until the Australians created it. Because of this mistake, you have missed the point the GP was making: the arbitrar of what is a true and what is false comes down to a human judgement, and Google is likely to base that on some type of concensus, since basing it on anything else would be problematic. In other words, if Google's plan is to say, "Well, everyone thinks that vaccines don't cause autism, but we know they do." and rank pages accordingly, that is a problem. If they go with consensus in every case, then there is a bias against corrective information. The consensus now is that h. pylori causes many ulcers. That is a representation... a fact. Is it a true fact, or a false fact? How do you know? Are we really any different than the folks in the 80s, who "knew" ulcers couldn't be caused by bacteria? Because we don't have any false facts now? That we know of?

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that a lot of the tools google used to have for getting better results have been removed or neuterd in some way.

Re: can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[WebCowboy]

Who decides what is indisputable? A crew of experts hand picked by google executives? A computer algorithm that does big data analysis of mob rule?

Once a thing becomes indisputable and thus factual, what happens when it is disputed in the future? When is dispute just crackpots and when is it valid? I remember 16mm films in school talking about how smog, particulates and so forth could block sunlight and bring about cooling that could trigger an ice age. Today clinate change is about heat trapping gasses heating up the planet. The idea we are heading into an ice age is laughable.

Nutritional facts are notoriously fluid and disputable things. All fatty foods used to be fattening and bad for the heart. Then it was discovered some fats...unsaturated vegetable fats...were good, and margerine consisting of hydrogenated vegetable fats were widely thought to be better than butter for the heart. But hydrogenation transforms such fats into trans fatty acids, which are virtually toxic to the heart. Also some saturated fats like coconut oil are supposedly healthy now, and eating moderate amounts of beef and other meats with saturated fat are better for the heart than a very low gat diet.

Facts are not simple clear cut things because nothing is absolutely indisputable. And often determining what is fact is tainted by political and commercial conflicts of interest.

Quite frankly i do not think Google is capable of being a trustworthy arbiter of what is an indisputable fact, no more than Microsoft, or Apple, or the Republican party, or the Democrats, or the UN or any institution.

Can we even say that it us a fact the sky is blue? We cant even agree on the colour of a woman's dress ;-)

I think it is a mistake to try to rank degree of "factualness" for these reasons...it reinforces conventional wisdom when sometimes it should be challenged. More important to me is to link information better to original sources. I would prefer Google work to trace statements/content to their origins and the relationships of content creators, then let searchers judge for themselves. For example, in researching climate change solutions, how much of it is funded by nuclear energy industry? It is a valid question to consider, since agressively shutting down fossil fuel power generation can be hijacked by such interests to further their own interests. This doesnt mean facts publushed by the nuclear industry are not valid, it just provides context so you can make informed decisions.

Ranking should remain based on how highly cited tge results are, with the "chain of citations" easily accessible, because the most highly cited information probably deserves the most scrutiny.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

But the doctors, who in the US are over 98% Republican because they hate us, still refuse to treat ulcers as something that can be cured. Instead, they use it as an opportunity to preach their beliefs. Mine hates alcohol so he demanded I stop drinking. The next doctor I went to hates Mexicans so he told me he wouldn't help me unless I pledged to not eat Mexican food. He claimed spicy food caused ulcers. The third guy wanted me to quit my job since I worked for a Thai restaurant. He lied and claimed the free food I eat while working caused the ulcer. I finally got help from a doctor that I met at an Occupy rally. He gave me Amoxicillin, and I have been fine since.

The only way this problem will be fixed is with more government control of healthcare. Those doctors need to be put in prison.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[AK Marc]

Ah, so because you don't believe in fat, the AHA is wrong? Rants like yours are the ones that would get pushed to the end of the list.

Re: can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite thing is a post like this surround by other posts yelling about how anyone would dare question their doctor about a vaccine.

Re: can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[reve_etrange]

There are plenty of doctors who spew anti-vaccine nonsense. Both the cause of ulcers and the value of vaccines were established by scientists, not doctors.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

Reinforcing your point: The Half Life of Facts

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor-recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the Brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.

But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics—literally the science of science. Knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.

The Half-Life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive fabric of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.

Re: can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you get your 'facts' from blogs and magazines rather than peer reviewed journals. Nutritional facts generally are facts, despite many people conflating opinions as facts. Take your rant on fats. Vitamin F was discovered in 1923 but were renamed six years later as "essential fatty acids". We've known for almost a century which fats were essential (required, good, healthy) and which were not. It has also been known that saturated fats are generally far worse for human health than unsaturated fats. However, saturated fats have better shelf life and other conveniences. So one unproven theory was that by hydrogenating unsaturated fats, we could get the health benefits of unsaturated fats and conviences of saturated fars. That was never a fact, that was a marketing push.

Coconut oil contains a lot of saturated fat. Is it bad? Yes. Is it worse than animal fat? No. Facts.

Eggs yolk contains a lot of saturated fat. Is it bad? Yes. Eggs contain a lot of cholesterol. Is it bad? Yes. Is it as bad as we thought? No, but it's still bad.

margerine consisting of hydrogenated vegetable fats were widely thought to be better than butter for the heart. -- "Widely thought" is not the definition of a fact. God and Santa are widely thought to exist. Humans are widely thought not to be responsible for climate change. Carbohydrates are widely thought to be unhealthy. Milk is widely thought to be healthy.

  But hydrogenation transforms such fats into trans fatty acids, which are virtually toxic to the heart. Also some saturated fats like coconut oil are supposedly healthy now, and eating moderate amounts of beef and other meats with saturated fat are better for the heart than a very low gat diet.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that's quite correct. The difference between "the Empire State Building" and "the Empire State Building is red" is that the second statement contains a predicate. So, more precisely, subjects ("things") indeed are neither true or false, but predicates about subjects certainly are, even if the truth value of those predicates are not yet part of our episteomological world.

In other words, "that bacteria can cause ulcers" has always been true. It just wasn't known to be a true proposition until it was demonstrated.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[JackieBrown]

But the doctors, who in the US are over 98% Republican because they hate us

I was wondering how long it would take for the verbatim phrase of "Republicans hate us" to move from troll to interesting/insightful.
Really does go to show if you say something enough, people will believe it.

This is the problem with Obama's campaign machine. His was the first to understand the power of repeating thing over and over again in simple terms and people will believe it no matter how ridiculous they original thought the idea was.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[orgelspieler]

Obama invented "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth"?! That's gotta be the most subtle Godwin's Law ever.

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[JackieBrown]

You're right. I thought the context was clear but I can see how it wouldn't be.

I should have added "through social media"

Re:can't wait to see it work on fox news web site

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this like a reverse troll?

Sell any stock before they launch this...

[burtosis]

I mean imagine if they *really* did push down pages with incorrect facts!!!?! ALL religious websites - all homeopathy websites - Fox News all down at the bottom. Not to mention how they would handle irony - it would actually be sad to see sites like The Onion punished. It's a nice idea but would require human level strong AI to automate and it still wouldn't be obvious where to draw the line.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[SofiKadaj]

Fox News, religious websites, homeopathy websites at the bottom? That sounds like a good reason to buy stock, not sell it.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[burtosis]

Rational people may think so but the stock price is based on the people who use google services. Stupid people make up a majority of most business models. Id expect a large backlash.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[sumdumass]

You are not envisioning a fact based result but a "your opinion" based result. Not really what is discussed here. Fox News for instance, gets more facts right then wrong even though they are selected to shill for the republicans. You have no facts stating that _ALL_religious_websites are wrong.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[Immerman]

Quite so, obviously the First Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is true. But I think that's widely enough known that it would rise to the top.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, the Google drones will fly around discover the REAL truth.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[Oligonicella]

All of which will still outrank CNN. :)

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[sumdumass]

Well it is true, you can even read about its creation or question its creator directly.

Or was you trying to be faceatious and your knee jerked so hard it hit you in the head and lowered your IQ to the point you think one specific example is all possible examples as was stated?

Well, maybe you are a true believer or is it posdible you are just a manga fan with a fetish for tenacle monsters?

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[reboot246]

And even CNN is more factually correct than MSNBC or NBC!!

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[burtosis]

Ok ok, I'll grant a few true facts on religious websites - such as we had a potluck last Wednesday. But the vast majority of claims are false. My god man they all conflict - Christians, Jews, Muslims - the overlap in concensus is tiny and the facts backing up what is agreed on are basically nonexistent. It takes a seriously intellectually dishonest mind to believe that one must be right at the expense of all the rest. Even more so when you ignore the mountains of facts that show religious revelation false.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[sumdumass]

There is not a mountain of facts that show religios rrvelations to be false. And you are the one being intelectually dishonest here.

In order to say one is not true, you have to posit something that is and prove it which cannot be done factually. You can state your beliefs but that is your opinion not fact. You can pretend science overrules religion but that again is your opinion not fact. Science cannot test the supernatural, at best it can say it isn't neccessary but it cannot even rule out the findings are not the results of the supernatural event/process.

But more importantly, you cannot paint all religious websites as the same. Lexicons for instance focus on the origin or words and accepted translated meanings given the time and manner used. That certainly can be factual. Online searchable bibles like bible gateway gives exact passages from a number of different bibles and translations. That certainly it factual.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[reve_etrange]

To be fair the Abrahamic religions actually do overlap in many - perhaps the majority - of their cosmological beliefs.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[reve_etrange]

There is not a mountain of facts that show religios rrvelations to be false.

You're right, it's more like a galaxy.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[sumdumass]

No, there is not. For everyone you think there is, any religion can simply claim it was created that way or the supernatural will of some supernatural being and you have absolutely no way to factually test or refute that. Note, unless it is a matter of some religion saying X and the sites saying Y, any injection of your beliefs is only your opinion not fact. Now this does not mean any religion it true, its just that you have no factual basis to say it is not.

You are simply wrong.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[burtosis]

There is no evidence outside the bible of Jesus. You would have thought with all the miracles, dead comming back to life, and trouble making someone would have noticed. The name Jesus wasn't even invented untill hundreds of years after the new testament was written - it was closer to Joshua in the original Greek that it was written in. Even then no records exist. The authors are actually not who they claim to be, even religous scholars agree on this. Therefore everything is a fiction and false. Yes the original comment was a bit tongue in cheek but if EVERY SINGLE falsifiable fact in the bible is proven wrong, tens of thousands of them, and zero are substantiated, then yes you are intellectually dishonest for beleiving the rantings of a syphilus addled brain bronze age goat herder over repeatable experiment you can see with your own eyes. You obviously don't believe in Thor or thousands of other gods. Have the balls to go just one more.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[burtosis]

To be fair the Abrahamic religions actually do overlap in many - perhaps the majority - of their cosmological beliefs.

Only if you assume very vague details. When actually questioned in a explicit way, very little actually overlaps. For example is god one entity or three? How about Jesus - prophet or god or neither? When you go beyond a handful of vague agreements you find that there is very little overlap indeed. In fact even within a specific religion or sect it varies by region and even church to church. The whole idea of a personal god, which pretty much always translates into god being exactly as the observer prefers, renders any objective universal coherence invalid.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[Immerman]

Simply commenting on the fact that the number of facts supporting the truth of most religions hovers around zero. Certainly there's few facts directly undermining them (other than their own inconsistency and the ridiculousness of taking their creation myths literally), but then there's no facts at all disproving the existence of unicorns or Russell's invisible teapot.

Basically, if this ranking system actually worked, only those sites merely claiming that "the bible states X" would have a chance at being anywhere near the top, anything actually claiming "X is true" would down-rank it radically. In fact, judging by my own experiences I'd venture a guess that even most "the bible states X" claims are verifiably false. It would probably mostly be scholarly analysis of religions that populated the top several pages.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[reve_etrange]

any religion can simply claim it was created that way or the supernatural will of some supernatural being and you have absolutely no way to factually test or refute that.

In principle, religions can make only nonfalsifiable claims, yes. However, all extant religions in fact make significant falsifiable claims.

I have never heard a Christian claim they believe only that their God created an inflationary spacetime and nothing else.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[sumdumass]

You have heard or heard of christians claiming either their god or the devil made it appear that way though. If you haven't, you haven't been paying attention.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[sumdumass]

Lol.. i bet your teacher marked you down for not following directions quite a bit. Not only doed you logical fallacy (appeal to authority) miss the point, your hatred for christians seems to make you think christians is all religions and therefore _all_religious_websites_.

Take a deep breath and think before you reply.

Re:Sell any stock before they launch this...

[AK Marc]

Fox News gets facts right because there are so few of them. Most of the programming is "opinion" shows that don't count facts. Wrong opinions, "I think that humans are descended from Thetans" or "a clear sky is a brilliant vermilion" don't count for the total.

One can't help but count opinions as facts, when doing something automated, so I'd expect Fox News to get a lower rank because of errors, even if errors of opinion.

Search Neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe there should be a concept such as Search Neutrality. I don't want a bigoted or politically correct Google biasing my search results any more than they currently do. If Google thinks this is a good idea then it would go a long way towards proving that Google cannot be trusted.

Re:Search Neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not comparable to network neutrality. There are no inherent barriers to entry for competition, and there is already bountiful competition. No action is necessary other than for you to choose which search engine you prefer.

Re:Search Neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

No inherent barriers to entry? Would you like to use my start-up search engine with a 900ms ping in your country and a rather compact (read: piss-poor) page map?
Google took a long time of growth with relatively weak competition to reach the quality it has now. All serious competitors are owned by large corporations.

Re:Search Neutrality?

[TapeCutter]

Maybe there should be a concept such as Search Neutrality.

Search is already neutral, it's the order of results that upsets people because by definition, ranking cannot be neutral. An intelligent search engine such as IBM's Watson gives a confidence rating on it's "facts", it can produce multiple answers each with a confidence ranking. They can also explain in excruciating detail how they arrived at the answer, and they can do it better than humans. Technology is a tool, a hammer that can be used to build or destroy a civilization.

Re:Search Neutrality?

[mc6809e]

He doesn't mean that there's a barrier to entering the search engine business. He means Google itself, having so much power, is a gate-keeper, deciding through their search results what sites deserve to be found quickly by average users and which sites do not.

Google does discriminate. It must. There's only a finite amount of screen space on a user's device or display so a decision must be made to prioritize certain sites over others.

Some site even pay for that prioritization.

Unanymous

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the web unamymously agree that vaccines cause autism?

Re:Unanymous

[TheReaperD]

Only on Facebook and Fox.

Re:Unanymous

[TapeCutter]

No, and that's the point.

it's slashdot!

[lkcl]

yaay, it's slashdot on steroids, yaay! with all the means by which true knowledge may be suppressed by misunderstandings, yaay! democracy at work to bubble up the sum of our ignorance rather than inconvenient and annoying truth. ahh gotta love it...

I can see how this might go wrong.

[SofiKadaj]

Search: Fox News
Fox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fox Head | 2015
Fox Glacier - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Search: Does life begin at conception?
Evolutionary biology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New England Journal of Medicine
No - Merriam-Webster Online

Search: New World Order
Your search - New World Order did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
-Make sure that all words are spelled correctly.
-Try different keywords.
-Try more general keywords.

Re:I can see how this might go wrong.

[SofiKadaj]

Search: Vaccinations autism proof. Results:

Google is becoming useless

[Ozoner]

This sounds like a great improvement.

Some years ago if I searched for a data sheet for an Electronic Component, I could rely on a direct link to the PDF in the first hit or so.

Now however, any worthwhile result is often many pages down the list. The first page or two are full of "Are you searching for xxxx? We don't have that right now, but here's a great way to earn big dollars!!".

Google is so badly scammed that I usually don't bother. I hate to say it, but even Bing is better now.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[SofiKadaj]

Uh. My first result for "Electric Component" is the Wikipedia page on electric components. I'm pretty sure your issue is malware, not Google.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent poster is not talking about looking for "Electronic component". He's looking for a information about a specific device based on it's type name or something similar.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[caseih]

The problem the GP mentions is a real one, at least it was for me a few months back, and no it's not a malware issue. Fake answer link farm sites were completely gaming Google's search. Perhaps things have gotten better as Google tweaks their algorithms. Wish I could remember what it was I was searching for when I last encountered this frustrating problem months ago, but I remember being very frustrated.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[solios]

Bing is also better on old hardware and marginal connections... even in Chrome. I have a 2009 Shuttle box and a megabit DSL link and Bing just kind of appears. Faster hardware improves things a bit but Google services just seem to assume infinite bandwidth - the lack of throttling on Google Drive makes it useless and OH GLOB I'M RANTING.

tldr; Bing is faster than Google - and loads immediately on those occasions when Chrome's address bar is horking like it has a hairball. It's not as drastic as the difference between Amazon (just loads) and Newegg (takes forever) but it's there.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no. Pick an obscure (or not so obscure) IC part number, google for part-number datasheet. Observe results.

Used to be you would get a PDF datasheet pretty much straight off. These days you have to dig, and dig, and dig some more.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[ortholattice]

Out of curiosity I recently tried to find out about a product, Power Innovator, whose annoying ads claiming to cut your electric bill by 80% keep popping up on various sites. While it is obviously a scam to anyone with the slightest knowledge of physics, they really have Google fooled. No matter what you type, "Power Innovator review", "Power Innovator scam", "Power Innovator ripoff", etc., every link, page after page, is a "review" or a page questioning "Is Power Innovator a scam?" each ending with a link to buy Power Innovator. I was unable to find any page clearly stating the obvious fact that it is a scam. I feel sorry for all the misinformed people who are sucked into this, and the company must be raking in a fortune of ill-gotten gains. This is a case where Google is completely useless.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[JaredOfEuropa]

It seems to be particularly bad for electronic components. When I search for parts that are rare or hard to get from a local supplier, Google often returns lots of links to legitimate web shops and price comparison sites that claim to have the part in stock or have price info on it, but in fact haven't. Sometimes the first shop that actually has the part in its catalogue won't appear until page 3 of the search results.

I have my doubts about this new algorithm improving things though.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[Ozoner]

Except I'm not looking for the phrase "Electronic Component". I'm looking for a specific data sheet for a specific component.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[pjt33]

It doesn't solve the general problem of SEO, but for the particular case you mention adding filetype:pdf to your search will help a lot.

Re:Google is becoming useless

[Anonymous Coward]

But have you tried Power Innovator? It's great and cut my business' costs by 80%!!

Well

[Subxerox]

Who truths the truthers?

Follow the herd or vanish

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, if your web page contents do not agree to some arbitrary consensus as defined by the pages Google chooses to trawl, your web page will not be listed anywhere near the top of the search results.

This is idiotic, as this has nothing to do with facts, and everything to do with conformance and not rocking the boat.

However, as a business plan, this might actually work: it will be easier to package the products to the advertisers, as all possibly controversial information is removed from the searches.

I for one welcome our Corporate Overlords!

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Iamthecheese]

More than once most or all popular media has agreed on "facts" that are not. When that happens a large number of people accept the claim as truth. This doesn't change for years at a time. Suppression of unpopular truths will be far more effective if people aren't even made aware that there is a dispute.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, if your web page contents do not agree to some arbitrary consensus as defined by the pages Google chooses to trawl, your web page will not be listed anywhere near the top of the search results.

Compared to today where you might well not be listed at the top unless you're popular. That too is an arbitrary standard for sorting search results.

This is idiotic, as this has nothing to do with facts, and everything to do with conformance and not rocking the boat.

I'd almost agree except that today popularity is most often based on conformance and not rocking the boat. Oh, and not listing things that'll get Google sued/shut down. I mean, honestly, do you think we'd have the darknet if Google was actually good at listing results based upon what people search for?

However, as a business plan, this might actually work: it will be easier to package the products to the advertisers, as all possibly controversial information is removed from the searches.

Yea, that's already done. This just gives Google a better excuse why advertisers products are listed higher in the results than their old intentional forced bumping of those results to the top. Beyond that, if it's merely a matter of sorting results then it could mean as little as what happens already today: the thing you really want is link four or five or perhaps even a few pages in if you're lucky. Worst case, you're fucked upon actually getting what you want.

I for one welcome our Corporate Overlords!

Why? Did they come through the door again?

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, if your web page contents do not agree to some arbitrary consensus as defined by the pages Google chooses to trawl, your web page will not be listed anywhere near the top of the search results.

This is idiotic, as this has nothing to do with facts, and everything to do with conformance and not rocking the boat.

Yeah, I have to agree with you. This could be used to enforce groupthink. I think that there may be one way to make this "fact checking" ranking better. If, instead of ranking pages by "truthiness", pages with questionable content were somehow flagged as controversial that would probably work for me. That way I would then be alerted that I might want to be a little more diligent in drilling down into an issue to get all sides of the story. My hope is that this would cause people to treat controversial/partisan "facts" with a bit more scepticism. A side benefit is that this might also highlight people and groups who are notorious for peddling bullshit. After all, Fox News or breitbart.com might not really like it if their name continually shows up on web searches with a "Liar, pants on fire" truth ranking. Optimistically, it might cause some to clean up their act a bit. I could see that as being a substantial improvement over the current page rankings based solely on popularity.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[camg188]

Google could offer the choice of which way you want your searches ranked. What would people bitch about then?

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Bill Dog]

Suppression of unpopular truths will be far more effective if people aren't even made aware that there is a dispute.

That's part of the idea behind the "the debate is over" thing; to make people believe that there is no more disagreement. If Google makes it so that arguments for one side of an issue are never seen, as being non-facts, then it'll be conveniently as if another side never existed. Goodbye nuance. Life will be so much simpler. Governments will be jealous.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[pipingguy]

Is there a way to remove a domain from a search? I.e., I don't want the first 50 results from a search for Apple to be from apple.com.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[calidoscope]

If Google starts showing preference to one se of candidates over another, could they be prosecuted for effectively making illegal campaign contributions??

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[ArsonSmith]

It's too complicated, there's too many choices. just tell me what I want to hear when I want to hear it and I'll be happy. Ohh but you can't learn anything about me with your intrusive spyware and snooping.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Karmashock]

No, otherwise most of the newspapers in the US would fall afoul of that. Most media organizations prefer one political party or political candidate over the other. And anyone paying attention can see it. The facts of it have been mathematically charted. A researcher took all the articles from various publications and saw how many times they said critical things of one political party or the other and pretty much without exception every paper had a strong bias one way or the other.

So no... google can pretty much do whatever they want because the first amendment protects private speech. Google is a private company. They're as free to bias and skew things as anyone.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Anonymous Coward]

try search: "apple -apple.com"

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[Chris Mattern]

apple -site:apple.com

will remove all sites at apple.com from a search for apple. Mind you, your search results will still all be about Apple Inc., but now none of them are from apple.com.

Re:Follow the herd or vanish

[pipingguy]

Thanks. I knew about keyword removal but not entire domains (makes sense though).

By facts, not links?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well there goes Wikipedia!

Re:By facts, not links?

[SofiKadaj]

Actually, Wikipedia has come along way. It is now on par with other encyclopedias and is only slightly beaten by Encyclopedia Britannica.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Shadow of Eternity]

It had come a long way, then it started being manipulated by ideology pushing extremists that have become very adept at abusing the hell out of labrynthian policies to the point that even when the author of a news article flat out says "They're lying, I never said that at all" it's the author that gets punished.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Required Snark]

There goes Slashdot!

Re:By facts, not links?

[Eythian]

[citation needed]

Re:By facts, not links?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Go talk to David Auerbach over at slate.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Eythian]

Ta. I was actually curious :)

Re:By facts, not links?

[swillden]

It had come a long way, then it started being manipulated by ideology pushing extremists that have become very adept at abusing the hell out of labrynthian policies to the point that even when the author of a news article flat out says "They're lying, I never said that at all" it's the author that gets punished.

This exact same complaint was common before it was shown that Wikipedia is on par with dead tree encyclopedias. What makes it more true now than it was then?

Re:By facts, not links?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there goes Wikipedia!

[citation needed]

Re:By facts, not links?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "Facts the web unanimously agrees on" bit sounds a lot like they're adopting Wikipedia's abysmal "verifiability, not truth" policy. Which means if you've got enough sources, no matter how biased or outright lying they are, it becomes acceptable.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Anonymous Coward]

> it was shown that Wikipedia is on par with dead tree encyclopedias

The linked article above is from 2005. A LOT has changed in a decade.

> What makes it more true now than it was then?

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the rise of political correctness fanatics, ideological brigades are accessible to every shmuck with a mobile phone and a chip on their shoulder.

You have groups openly state on Wikipedia that it's their goal to push their viewpoints on articles. Clickbait sites written by people close to these groups get turned into sources. Articles get sanitised. Dissenting editors get bullied out or outright banned.

Wikipedia has shown again and again that its bureaucracy cannot deal with this threat because many of their admins and "notable editors" are already part of the problem. They protect pet articles and redefine "reliable source" to be whatever site parrots their opinion. And those who run the site are powerless.

Wikipedia has become a social media site, not a knowledge base.

Re:By facts, not links?

[swillden]

> it was shown that Wikipedia is on par with dead tree encyclopedias

The linked article above is from 2005. A LOT has changed in a decade.

What has changed that's relevant? The existence of mobile devices? Bah.

> What makes it more true now than it was then?

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the rise of political correctness fanatics

Political correctness is new since 2005? Ummm, let me guess, you're under 30, aren't you?

You have groups openly state on Wikipedia that it's their goal to push their viewpoints on articles.

Which was also true before 2005.

Clickbait sites written by people close to these groups get turned into sources.

Also true before 2005.

I'll stop here, but nothing you mention was any different previously.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ.

Whether it's Wikipedia going from "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" to "if the owner of the article agrees with you". Whether it's traditional journalism dying in favor of clickbait to monetise ads, which turns citations into a farce. Whether it's "social justice" types getting more radical and hate-filled. Or whether it's just because the more popular Wikipedia became the bigger a target it got on its back.

These are all rather recent (with regard to the study from 2005) changes. Sure, every one of these issues existed before. However they've gotten progressively worse to a point that makes 2005 look quaint. Back then Wikipedia fought to keep external sources from spreading misinformation. These days they fail because said forces come from within.

Re:By facts, not links?

[matfud]

An encyclopedia is never authoritative. It is an overview. It provides references for you to follow. It is an entry point to the subject you looked up. It is never the be all and end all. There is a reason why Wikipedia has a no original research clause.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Can't beat a primary source.

Re:By facts, not links?

[Shadow of Eternity]

2005 was well before the rise of modern outright-falsehood pushing online "journalism" which deliberately weaponized wikipedia by abusing the Woozle Effect.

Re:By facts, not links?

[swillden]

Bah. Outright falsehood-pushing "journalism" is as old as journalism, and the online version of it as old as online journalism. Wikipedia has been abused as long as it has existed, and the Woozle Effect is also nothing new -- indeed the name and awareness of the phenomenon predates the existence of ARPANET, much less the Internet.

Ripe for snake oil salesman

[wiredlogic]

The PBS snake oil salesmen that come out during the periodic beg-athons manage to lie while spewing out facts as half-truths that don't support their entire argument. A machine is unlikely to be able to distinguish these sort of lies never mind the hordes of gullible people that fall for them.

Re:Ripe for snake oil salesman

[Required Snark]

Yes, there's no snake oil commercial television either. Shows are not interrupted every ten minutes with loud inappropriate distractions that are used by most people to get something to eat or go to the toilet.

What universe are you from? I've never talked to anyone from that universe.

Cool!

[AndyKron]

So Google wants Creationist websites to disappear. Cool!

Re:Cool!

[Oligonicella]

Your bigotry is showing and it's not even warranted as this won't 'disappear' Creationist websites at all. But you display exactly the reason this is a bad idea. Fortunately, I don't think they'll be able to determine the thin line between printed fact and fiction.

Facts + Politics == ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how this will play out with political 'facts'?

Re:Facts + Politics == ?

[Presto Vivace]

Indeed, who determines facts? I don't have a good feeling about this.

Re:Facts + Politics == ?

[gnupun]

Easy, facts are determined by:
a) proof
b) authority figures (scientists, politicians, book authors etc.)
c) combined opinion of many experts and wannabe experts.

(a) is the only valid form of fact but is often difficult to obtain and therefore you have rely on (b) and/or (c). BTW, slashdot uses the (c) model for facts.

Re:Facts + Politics == ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Klout score.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Karmashock]

While in theory the idea is great, the problem is that one person's facts are another person's propaganda.

Look at the crap storms on wikipedia for example with all sorts of various groups all fighting over who gets to edit some page. Can you honestly say that always ends with the people standing up for truth winning? I can think of a few situations where it was controversial and the people that were pushing bs just happened to win or nearly as bad force moderators to lock the listing in a pre crisis state. Thus basically white washing the whole incident out of existence.

Again, I think it is a nice idea in theory, in practice I'm sure assholes and trolls are going to fuck it up.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing could possibly go wrong. Everything on the internet is true. Therefore, it will have no effect.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I agree that it sounds like a step in the proper direction.

There are way too many lies and misinformation out there on the Internet.

http://merchantsofdoubt.org/

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Karmashock]

The simple fact that you see partisan advantage proves you agree it will be exploited. You just think it will be exploited to help you rather than hurt you.

The funny thing you're not getting is that google itself is far from indispensible. There are lots of other search engines and most of them are comparable in quality.

At best... assuming you're right... what would happen is that people that thought more like you would be even further echo chambered then you already are... protected from alternative view points and increasingly controlled by your ruling opinion makers... while the internet culture further fragments.

You're hardly going to win against your political rivals because they'll just use Bing or something. All that will happen is that YOU are aware of less. Will your opinions change? You weren't moved by sites that came up that you felt were pushing disinformation in the first place. No one really is at this point. We can smell our own and we treat with skepticism anyone outside our tribe.

You might argue that this would help you fight for the allegiance of the moderates and the middle. And you might have something there. But things are so social networked at this point that you'll have a hard time playing gatekeeper with any proficiency.

In any case... your opinion has merely validated my initial statement.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Kohath]

I'd like to hear a good explanation why this isn't just self-reinforcing groupthink. For every 10 genuine facts, you'll see some widely quoted falsehood like "1 in 5 women on college campuses is sexually assaulted" promoted by Google as a fact. These kinds of bogus statistics are very common.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, I think it is a nice idea in theory, in practice I'm sure assholes and trolls are going to fuck it up.

Well, yeah. But I still don't see how this method is worse than their current one.

So, the method suggested have some major glaring flaws. The method in use have even worse ones.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Karmashock]

Given that the stat you're referring to was spread by the US CDC despite being contradicted by the FBI crime statistics, you can see how it can lead to issues.

There are a lot of things you probably think are facts that aren't... they're often widely accepted by very educated people because for various reasons it greases a lot of axes that need to be ground.

Think of all the untrue things that are repeated by the media, the government, etc. There is a lot of stuff on Wikipedia that is bullshit. Why would you think Google would succeed where the international media, major governments, other dot com services that specialize in information, and occasionally even academia starts spouting some bullshit.

How many medical studies have been shown to be fraudulent? And yet despite that their false findings were reported as truth for years. And those are just the ones you know about.

After a few media cover ups I've seen, I wouldn't say that bigfoot isn't real... as idiotic as that sounds... because the reality is that I've been lied to so many times I really can't say what is and isn't true unless I have first hand knowledge. And giving yet another organization the ability to further filter my information and presume to decide what is and isn't true... why would I be happy about that?

Would you trust Fox news to decide what was true or not? What about MSNBC? How about any of the major newspapers? Why would Google be more pure than them?

Look... Google hasn't earned my trust to determine what is and isn't true. Period. I like them as a company. I like their products. But do I trust them to determine truth? No.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Karmashock]

The current system doesn't presume to judge. It just works on raw metrics. There is a purity and an impartiality in it. There is no inherent attempt to control or shape opinion. What people click on most often when they type in those search terms is what pops to the top. That's a fair and impartial system. Don't fuck with it.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Karmashock]

While of course it would be politically convenient if your rival political factions in a democracy were shut out from any ability to coordinate, debate, or express themselves... there are a few problems with your fascist agenda.

First, you are admitting I'm right in that you agree it could or even should be used for propaganda purposes.

Second, in shutting out your rivals you're going to marginalize google in the first place. They'll just move to other systems. Look at Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or the Wallstreet Journal. Do you honestly think you're going to shut them down? They'll just create something else that will rapidly be just as effective. There are a dozen search engines besides Google. If google says "fuck you" to half of America then half of America will just start using Bing or something. So you'll have accomplished absolutely nothing besides google losing half its marketshare to its rivals by pointlessly pissing people off.

Third, your whole line about the "common good" is basically the same old "greater good" argument that the Nazis were fans of. You want your rivals silenced by force rather then meeting them in open public debate. This shows both that you're not actually a fan of democracy, that you're willing to impose your views by force against the wishes of others, and that you'll have that same blind faith in your own actions found in any fanatic while they do it. So... basically you're a terrible person. No offense intended. But the shit you're typing is indefensible. You can't possibly be a liberal because you don't believe in "liberty". What you believe in is the orthodoxy of your dogma and you're prepared to subvert democracy to get what you want. Here is a lesson for you, sport. The means ARE the ends. That is, the process by which you create something has a major influence on what you ultimately create. If you gain power through trickery, extortion, force, etc then your power will not be based on the truth or the will of the people but rather on your trickery, extortion, and free use of force. That will be the nature of the society you create. And that will furthermore justify your opposition to respond in kind. If you lock them out of debate then they will be entirely justified to respond by shutting YOU out of debate or just ceasing power or something.

I don't know what to tell you. I find posts like yours to be disappointing. You're basically saying you want a king or an oligarchy to cease power and rule with an iron fist... managing everything with some digital ministry of truth. You make me sad.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well, I know of a situation where a person who happens to have a wikipedia page about himself tried to correct some certainly FACTUAL fact ( like a birth date or kids name or something, can't remember exactly) It just got reverted with citation needed. After actually explaining in the discussion page it's a known fact, and that there aren't any places supporting the wrong fact on the page either and getting reverted, argued with, and flamed, he just let it be in frustration.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Karmashock]

yep. Which is why open discussion without censorship is a good idea.

Just let everyone say what they think. Dumb ideas are going to be shown as such. Anyone afraid of having an open discussion or that insists on contradicting opinions be censored is merely admitting that they are afraid of an open discussion on the issue and fear contradiction/argument/debate.

Such people should be treated with the casual contempt of all cowards and confidence men.

The very idea of censorship of speech stands in opposition to democracy itself. And if that's really want people want... then we'll just have a king or a dictator for life. And then whenever you happen to disagree with that guy... have fun being instantly ignored.

what coding language

[Anonymous Coward]

Really general comment, just looking to understand something of this complexity.

False facts?

[Anonymous Coward]

We have words for those... falsehoods, falsities, lies, etc.

Well, SEO is now dead simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what type of content they want. Delete your message boards. Promote climate change non-profits in your sidebar. Link to vaccine give-a-ways. Watch that PR jump. Bet the script looks for rainbow colored backgrounds and, OMG, Ponies!!!! FML, time to drink.

Comments?

[viperidaenz]

So commentors on a news website spouting out opinions can de-rank it?

Re:Comments?

[Anonymous Coward]

Commenters pointing out lies in news articles has caused too much trouble, so the meainstream media has gotten rid of comments on news articles and instead tells you to go discuss it in a separate forum.

Everyone else has switched to a centralized comment system (Disquss) which loads via JavaScript so it might not affect search results. But it does let Discuss have a God-like view of every comment you've ever posted on various articles, and even which articles you looked at even if you didn't comment on them just by loading their JavaScript code and cookies.

Re:Comments?

[Pope Hagbard]

The problem with news article comments is the mouthbreathing fucktards who inevitably make Youtube look like Mensa in comparison.

This is censorship based on official story

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure censorship

Sounds good to me

[Anonymous Coward]

So this will punish those idiots who think the dress is blue and black by pushing them down the search results while ranking up those who agree with 90% of the Internet that it's white and gold, right?

Sounds like a great system to me! I can't see any way that using facts that a large majority have agreed on could possibly go wrong.

Mugatu says...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth"? How the fudge is that supposed to work?! Have they ever browsed the web?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG7LjVCj50Y

"Facts"

[Anonymous Coward]

Like "1 in 4 women will be raped" or "more domestic abuse occurs on super bowl sunday than any other day of the year"?

"Google is evil" = false fact = ranking--

[Anonymous Coward]

profit++

Stuff goes here that is deemed important by some.

[Anonymous Coward]

The detractors are looking at this from an absolutes perspective. Look at this in relation to the current and highly-gamed system, then evaluate.

FEO

[Kunedog]

If this ever happens, expect Fact Engine Optimization to become a new industry, and do exactly what SEO did to the reliability and utility of search engines.

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

"Fact optimization" is already behind more than one multi-billion dollar industry: advertising, political lobbying...

And this is why I fear this initiative, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure. Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct. Moreover, censoring dissenting opinions is a terrible reaction to active manipulation and even to old-fashioned gossip, because it removes the best mechanism for correcting the groupthink and promoting more informed debate, which is introducing alternative ideas from someone who knows better or simply has a different (but still reasonable) point of view.

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

Re:FEO

[Mr. Shotgun]

If this ever happens, expect Fact Engine Optimization to become a new industry, and do exactly what SEO did to the reliability and utility of search engines.

Finally! It is the tautology club's moment to shine

Re:FEO

[thieh]

It'will be interesting to see whether websites of some particular political party or lobbying group get downranked so much to disappear from search results completely.

Re:FEO

[dryeo]

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

A good example of a wrong fact that too many people believe. As soon as people really started traveling, especially on the ocean, it became obvious that the Earth is not flat. Something like 2500 years ago a Greek used geometry to measure the circumference of the Earth though there were idiots like Columbus who were convinced the world was much smaller then the generally accepted size.

Re:FEO

[AK Marc]

Yes, 2+2=4, therefore global warming is a lie by Al Gore, who served as Vice President. I'm sure the linguistic style will look odd at first, but packing one lie per page and lots of valid facts could game the system. That's why they should release it early, so we can start gaming it early, so they can improve it before release (but they'll get around it by calling everything a beta).

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Rudolf Hoess's confession, in which he confesses to the murder of three million Jews, going up or down?

Is the old plaque at Auschwitz, which says that four million Jews were killed, going up or down?

Is the new plaque at Auschwitz, which says that one and a half million Jews were killed, going up or down?

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ah, yes, an excellent follow-up, presented with great subtlety: any writing that makes its point through hyperbole, analogy, figurative imagery, or indeed any other style that isn't literally, objectively, factually, 100% correct could also suffer. Well played, fellow Slashdotter.

Re:FEO

[dmt0]

So, if enough of the high-ranking trustworthy sites like cnn.com tell you that the bailing out of the banks in 2008 was an unambiguously good thing, than that becomes a fact? And if you opine otherwise, you're ranked down? So what we have here is a full blown censoring of the web, nothing less.

Re:FEO

[dryeo]

Don't be daft, good vs bad are not facts. Facts are things like when the bank bailout happened, which laws were used, who signed the laws, which banks benefited, how big of bonuses were given out etc. Ideally you base your opinion about good vs bad based on facts rather then bullshit and good vs bad is always an opinion.
And how is it censorship if a private entity prints whatever it wants? You, I and Google are free to put whatever we want on sites we own. Everyone is free to visit which ever sites they want to visit and we're all free to stop visiting a site if we don't like/agree with its content. Google fucks up and they'll go the way of Alta Vista.

Re:FEO

[Zontar The Mindless]

A lot of people were killed at Auschwitz. A lot of them were Jews, killed simply because they were Jews. They numbered in the millions. How many millions is immaterial. Now KGFY.

Re:FEO

[dmt0]

Don't be daft, good vs bad are not facts. Facts are things like when the bank bailout happened, which laws were used, who signed the laws, which banks benefited, how big of bonuses were given out etc. Ideally you base your opinion about good vs bad based on facts rather then bullshit and good vs bad is always an opinion. And how is it censorship if a private entity prints whatever it wants? You, I and Google are free to put whatever we want on sites we own. Everyone is free to visit which ever sites they want to visit and we're all free to stop visiting a site if we don't like/agree with its content. Google fucks up and they'll go the way of Alta Vista.

OK, that was a bad example. "Who plotted 9/11". That's a question regarding a fact that is disputed. But there is an official status quo version that is more widely accepted than others. Will that become a fact? Regarding censorship - yes, Google is not the only search engine out there. Let's see if Bing makes an announcement in the nearest future saying that they're implementing a similar technology to become more "competitive" against Google.

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

But... what he said was correct... I'm confused by your response.

We have known for thousands of years that the world is round.

Re:FEO

[mwvdlee]

One the other hand, this will be the end of all religious websites.
After all, I think we can all agree religion isn't factual, right. Right?

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fact optimization" is already behind more than one multi-billion dollar industry: advertising, political lobbying...

And this is why I fear this initiative, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure. Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct. Moreover, censoring dissenting opinions is a terrible reaction to active manipulation and even to old-fashioned gossip, because it removes the best mechanism for correcting the groupthink and promoting more informed debate, which is introducing alternative ideas from someone who knows better or simply has a different (but still reasonable) point of view.

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

My advice to save a lot of time and effort, Do not let republicans, terrorists, the religious, anyone connected with the oil companies or climate change deniers anywhere near this technology ever!

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

It'will be interesting to see whether websites of some particular political party or lobbying group get downranked so much to disappear from search results completely.

Interesting in that the Deep web 2.0 will be all the lobbyists, republican news sources including fox news, terrorist sites a la ISIS and Al Qaeda, the vatican, the oil companies, the christian science church, the church of mormon.. basically all religions etc.. and all of them will be equal with all the Deep web 1.0 content, drug dealers, the Mafia, bit coin hunters, organ sellers, penis enlargement scams etc..

I am all for it!

Re:FEO

[Dog-Cow]

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

Oh, the irony! It is a myth that most of the world thought the world was flat "not so long ago". The western world has known differently since the time of the Greeks. I have no idea what the Chinese believed.

Re:FEO

[CrimsonAvenger]

though there were idiots like Columbus who were convinced the world was much smaller then the generally accepted size.

There is a certain amount of evidence that Columbus lied about how big he thought the world was, in order to convince the Spanish crown to finance his expedition.

It's not like the New World was completely unknown in Europe before Columbus - FLemish fishermen were drying fish in Newfoundland before Columbus was born. And it's quite possible that Columbus knew that.

If so, and in light of Spain's interest in breaking the Portugese monopoly on trade with the Far East, a little "creative interpretation" of the world's size might have been sufficient to convince the Spanish Crown that a trip west was a worthwhile investment....

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that SOME people traveled on the ocean doesn't mean the majority of people did an so most still "KNEW" the earth was flat.

Re:FEO

[silentcoder]

When you can't find a page about antivaxxing or climate denial, you'll know it worked.

Re:FEO

[Wootery]

My Slashdot pedantry for the day: I'm sure you mean advocating, not about.

Re:FEO

[silentcoder]

I did actually. Websites DEBUNKING pseudo-scientific nonsence shouldn't be getting downgraded !

Re:FEO

[AmiMoJo]

Those aren't facts though... In the popular sense of the word perhaps, but probably not what Google engineers are thinking. Chances are they are looking for common myths, commonly mis-attributed quotes, simple mathematical errors, typos and the like.

I'm thinking things like "glass is a liquid", "we only use 10% of our brains", getting famous people's birthdays wrong etc.

Re:FEO

[retroworks]

Exactly. Fighting misinformation posted widely is the most important form of journalism there is.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/06/21/231250/uk-man-sentenced-to-16-months-for-exporting-e-waste-despite-91-reuse

CBS 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, CNN, John Stossel, everyone unanimously republished a stat in 2002 about "e-waste" exports which stated that 75%-80% of these exports were dumped and recycled in primitive conditions. Science Daily even reported that Agbogbloshie (city dump in Accra) was the "most toxic place on earth". And it was all bullshit, came from one ass-pulled stat in 2002 which the source actually now denies even saying. How would a correction to this bullshit ever happen? I guess if you were careful to cite the bad stats, Google would find them on your page and you could correct them. But if you simply provide correct information (2012 UNEP study 279 seized used electronics sea containers in 2009 imports found 91% repair and reuse), you'd be out of luck.

Please sign the petition btw #freehurricanebenson http://www.ipetitions.com/peti...

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Of course we have. The response was deliberately paradoxical. Think about it.

Re:FEO

[houghi]

"glass is a liquid". This brings back memories of news:AFU. Does Floss Glow?

Google has all of AFU, so if they just follow that, all should be well.

hou "I do not have a middle name" ghi

Re:FEO

[ilsaloving]

*cough* Fox News *coughcough*

Re:FEO

[houghi]

The power of google is, however, more subtle. They do not need to fuck up, they just need to direct trafic to wherever they desire and they already do that. Your searchresults are different to mine.

And I have no way of knowing why I do not find the same interesting sites as you do, There is a TED talk about the subject called (I think) Living in an Internet bubble.

Google has the power to influence what people read and thus what people think. Not as a whole. Not with everybody. All they need is some of the people all of the time.

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there's the hypothesis that Henry the Navigator had access to maps from the voyages of Zhang He's treasure fleet, but was understandably wary of losing exclusive access to the new route Asia.

Re:FEO

[hairyfeet]

And if you believe a publicly traded corporation, one that many would argue has gotten nastier WRT to identity and free speech as they go along, won't manipulate this when the "facts" go against their corporate agenda? I have some magic beans you might be interested in.

Re: FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

it works 90% of the time, everytime.

Re: FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect point to point out perfectly. ;} Do I get to join the club to be in the club?

Re: FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok why

Re:FEO

[TemporalBeing]

"Fact optimization" is already behind more than one multi-billion dollar industry: advertising, political lobbying...

And this is why I fear this initiative, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure. Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct. Moreover, censoring dissenting opinions is a terrible reaction to active manipulation and even to old-fashioned gossip, because it removes the best mechanism for correcting the groupthink and promoting more informed debate, which is introducing alternative ideas from someone who knows better or simply has a different (but still reasonable) point of view.

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

My advice to save a lot of time and effort, Do not let republicans, terrorists, the religious, anyone connected with the oil companies or climate change deniers anywhere near this technology ever!

Or the democrats, liberals, communists, facists, socialists...

oh, wait...is there anyone left to use the technology?

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore didn't serve as Vice President?

Re:FEO

[AK Marc]

(true) 2+2=4, (wrong) global warming is a lie, (true) Al Gore was VP. You mix deliberate lies in surrounded by irrelevant truths, to increase the truthiness of the page.

Re:FEO

[MeNotU]

So that's why Native Americans were called Indians? Not trying to hinder the white-washing or hero worship, just asking...

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

DEBUNKING pseudo-scientific nonsence

You have great faith in your "science", young one.

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

We can then run the worlds history books through the "fact engine". That will be interesting.

Re:FEO

[jfengel]

For some reason, he didn't head off to Newfoundland; he went at tropical latitudes. If he was trying to follow a line of latitude due west to Asia, he was going the VERY long way. If he hadn't bumped into something along the way, he'd have been deeply screwed.

The direct route from Portugal to Japan would have taken him northeast. He probably had suspicions that the northeast passage wouldn't work, but the further north he went, the better. He'd have been better off going to Newfoundland. He would have failed to find the northwest passage, but he couldn't know that, either.

The explanation that he thought it was smaller would account for that. If he was going based on his suspicion that there might be something that far south, he had little evidence to support it, and was really staking his life it. It certainly paid off in spades, but that could easily have been a lie he paid for with his life.

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

And I find your lack of faith disturbing....

Re:FEO

[rtb61]

The easiest way to control user ranked web searches is to simply register the users and pay them. The reason for the token payment for each rated search because of course it creates a far more accurate registered user base, those payments need to go somewhere to someone, hence a full validation system ends up in place. Payments can be of the credit against Google services variety, rather than cash payments ie build up credit to purchase Google services or even devices. Ratings to cover quality of page and accuracy relevant to the services and most importantly of all randomly audited quality of the rating itself ie three strikes and you are out.

Catch with this is it is slow to react to new sites and new content on existing sites, benefit is it can supplement other automated methods.

Same old, same old, many hands make light work and Google can draw from tens of millions of user, it just needs to provide more 'retail' user services to exchange for gredits. Catch with really quality search as far as google greed is concerned, the more accurate the less sites you visit, the less time you spend on the search engineer and the less endlessly annoying and shit product adds you see. Google seems pretty much not to give one crap about the quality of the products it promotes or the accuracy in advertising they present, yes, they are Google's responsibility, you present lies, then you are the liar, even when you didn't write the lies.

Re:FEO

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: "You can no longer find any of Obama's speeches."

Re:FEO

[romons]

I did actually. Websites DEBUNKING pseudo-scientific nonsence shouldn't be getting downgraded !

Sadly, this is going to be a problem. Their algorithm is to uprank things that everybody (well, almost everybody) agrees on, while downranking things that people don't agree on. There are clearly ways to scam this sort of system, supressing facts that you don't care about by generating lots of contradictory websites.

Storefront websites are FULL of facts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that e-commerce websites are the sites most likely to purchase advertising from Google and are websites filled with hundreds or thousands of pages that contain little other than basic facts.

Google couldn't possibly have chosen thus to help prioritize commercial storefronts and help bury user-to-user discussion sites because that would be pretty evil.

How will it rate http://dhmo.org ?

[TimSSG]

How will it rate http://dhmo.org/ ? Tim S.

Not to mention...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites that will be hurt are the ones that depend on waves of bloggers all linking to the same story because they were told to do so.

Huff Post, Vox, USA Today, MSNBC, the list goes on and on.

 

Propaganda Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

That would make Google a propaganda tool. Rather than invest in wide-spread propaganda campaigns, this will allow governments to centralise their activity.

Google already is somewhat like a violation of net neutrality, but this would make it like the Great Firewall of China. That said, its pretty much that way already.

Re:Propaganda Tool

[Zontar The Mindless]

Greetings from Guangzhou!

Ever been on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China?

Didn't think so.

Now... You were saying...?

Re:Propaganda Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

The algorithms and indexes ensure that only a select group of sites can be discovered, the order determines how much traffic flow they get. In a practical sense, how does this differ from a firewall like China's?

The answer is...not much.

I would agree that this is not entirely Google's fault, it is the nature of the web and search. That said, there must be an alternative means of discoverability.

Holy fuckolies

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be one the stupidest things I've heard of in my 38 years of working with computers, largely for the reasons already mentioned upthread.

Sure, there are lots of cut and dried cases. Some nutjob's site claims vaccines cause autism, so it gets dinged for that in the rankings. Fine by, and fine by anyone who values objective truth over ideology.

But there are many complex, gray areas, often described in perversely convoluted ways, that smart, objective people can argue about what's being said, let alone whether it's "the truth". Take climate change. The fundamental issues of how much CO2 we've emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, how much we emit per year now, how much is in the atmosphere and the oceans, and the general heat-trapping effect of it are very well known. But when you venture into the knock-on effects, like how and how quickly CC will affect the Arctic or the Amazon rain forest, not only are there many differing opinions, but there has been a string of discoveries (almost all bad news) within the last decade that reverse a lot of judgments about what is and isn't objectively true, without changing the overarching conclusion that CC is very, very bad and we need to get off our asses and do something about it. I could see serious web pages having their rankings change pretty dramatically in the light of new discoveries, with considerable disagreement about when new science has established a consensus that can be treated as being "the truth".

Re:Holy fuckolies

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those uncertainties result in "there is no problem with AGW, keep going as we are".

The existence of uncertainty is not existence of complete uncertainty.

dangerous bubble of consesus ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... will censor new and controversial ideas, which are often the ones which bring us progress.
Should it really be left to google to decide what is factual and what is not?

It is a liberal conspiracy

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Fox news will be ranked very low and the Republicans will scream. But some relief to Rick Santorum after all these years.

This shifts the weakness in Google's rankings

[aussersterne]

from gameability (in short, SPAM) to politics. Rather than punish above-board or non-predatory websites, it will punish both subversive and innovative thought that runs well ahead of social consensus. Sure, it will also eliminate willful misinformation, but it turns Google into an inherently conservative, rather than socially innovative, force.

Can't say I think it's better. Probably not any worse, but certainly not panacea.

Re:This shifts the weakness in Google's rankings

[StevenMaurer]

from gameability (in short, SPAM) to politics. Rather than punish above-board or non-predatory websites, it will punish both subversive and innovative thought that runs well ahead of social consensus. Sure, it will also eliminate willful misinformation, but it turns Google into an inherently conservative, rather than socially innovative, force.

Can't say I think it's better. Probably not any worse, but certainly not panacea.

You seem to be confusing "opinion" with "fact". Presumably "subversive" and "innovative" thought is simply giving a different take on established fact, as opposed to actually pulling "facts" out of one's ass - which is the way many websites work these days.

I can't help but think this is a good thing, because my opinion is the same as Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

The biggest lies are immersed in true facts

[Burz]

The mass media (aka 'infotainment complex') is a prime example that if you tell the facts all day about fires, robberies, weather, and (selectively) arrests... then you gain a certain credibility to use in starting a war, or to keep suggesting that everyone on the street is just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire (if only the government would stop this regulation stuff).

Its possible Google's new ranking idea could be a benefit to humanity IF they make the logic and the rankings transparent. That would at least allow the raters to be rated by watchdogs.

You should be scared

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact, truth. According to whom?

If this does not scare you then you are in the wrong business.
The World According to Google? Facebook? DHS? The current political party in power?
That is a lot of Faith in any system and as all you geeks know Faith is the antithesis of Reason.

Its a corporate fascist wet dream - controlling your reality.

Problem is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Truth is relative. The potential for abusive censorship is enormous.

So much for science

[holophrastic]

So every time science changes, google will ignore it -- or crash. I want to know what will happen to the site that say pluto is a planet. Then the ones that say pluto is not a planet. And then, I want to know about the next time pluto becomes a planet.

So google's going to ignore every site that says anything new that contradicts something old. climate change will be fun. so will vitamins, vaccinations, and any new religions.

But hey, google already doesn't believe my city, just because my city is 300 miles away from another city spelled with 4 of the 6 letters the same. I'll never find a bakery this way.

The only way this work out

[Anonymous Coward]

... is if either their definition of a fact is so bsic that it's pointless "the sky is blue!" or they have a settings panel that let's you choose the basis of your own 'facts' (i.e. are you a conservative or a liberal? Creationism or Evolution? etc. and so on and so forth).

Otherwise, google is just in for a shit storm on this regardless of how good their algorithm is at determining true facts.

There was a time before Google

[ArcadeMan]

WebCrawler, AlvaVista, etc. Remember those?

If Google search results start being useless, people will start using another search engine and Google will simply vanish like the others before it.

So who checks the fact checkers?

[epyT-R]

or is this going to be a digital galileo where unpopular fact is pushed to the bottom..

umm

[superwiz]

So they are gonna just redirect to Wikipedia? Facts are only as good as editorial discretion.

off by one error

[superwiz]

It's 3/1/15... not 4/1/15.

Echo chamber

[mlkj]

So they are essentially raising popular opinions to the top, and flagging unpopular opinions as wrong.

I'm not convinced that this would be any better than counting incoming links.

Hello status quo

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, Google wants to enforce the status quo by lowering the ranking of any website that dares to question the agreed upon "facts". This puts Google in a position of being an arbiter of "truth". I don't trust Google with much right now; if they go through with this I'll trust them even less (kind of ironic, huh?).

Re:Hello status quo

[Righ]

Come on sweet Caroline. I'll get me coat.

hrmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

so if this was 1000 years ago in Europe, sites that said earth was round would be at the end of the list?

Re:hrmm...

[NoOneInParticular]

The 'fact' that a significant number of people believed that the earth was round 1000 years ago is itself a myth ([citation needed]). The myth was popular in the late 19th century to highlight the superiority of the scientific method over religious dogma w.r.t. the theory of evolution.

When Google Met Wikileaks the book

[jmd]

Looks like Eric Schmidt was paying some attention to what Julian Assange was explaining in the meeting back in June 2011.

Who decides as to what is correct

[EmperorOfCanada]

If a site says the world is flat and is filled with rationals about it being flat then that site should probably come up on a "flat earth" search. Yet we can all agree that the facts in this case are completely bogus.

But what about inconvenient facts, for instance the various western governments put out employment numbers that are pretty hard core "facts" yet other people will look at the same "facts" and realize that they have had massive amounts of spin put on them. For instance in my neck of the woods they desperately hide the fact that most jobs being created are really crappy. Thus these "facts" then become politicized.

Or what about someone writing about NSA evildoing? Those are facts that the government would love to go away. Or what if every stock analyst suddenly agreed that Google was doomed as a stock?

Then there is group think. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis there were some "crackpots" who called it exactly and made fortunes based on their predictions; yet those facts flew in the face of general consensus. The same in economics. One joke at many economics universities is that the questions never change on the final exam, it is the answers that change year to year. If you look at something such as to the best time to loosen monetary policy and every major economic school has its own "facts".

I don't think that Google's search engine problems come from facts it is more that SEO whores like huffpo or the various directories are driving all the results to their crap sites. I don't know how many times I have searched for a company that has a perfectly good site that has not been through an SEO pimping putting it on page 3 or more while the first many pages are all kinds of crap yellowpages that ask "Is this your site?" where they want to upsell the owners on crap services.

Re:Who decides as to what is correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Snopes.com will become impossible to find in Google's search results!

It might cut down on spam however..

[Anonymous Coward]

There are forums where spammers come in during the middle of the night and post things with hundreds of links. They abuse HTML in such a way that it is all hidden, and some boilerplate text is all the user sees. If google stops counting links, they won't reward the spammers.

The question of how you arbitrate which sites are more factual than others is a hornets nest however.

Since when is Google using indegree?

[Anonymous Coward]

I might be wrong here, but the original Page Rank algorithm was revolutionary because it replaced indegree (the count of incoming links) with eigenvector centrality.

Did this article just get it wrong?

ok, give us a couple.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll read it tomorrow,right?

I got your "facts" right here ...

[CaptainDork]

... in my advertiser's purchase order.

Re:I got your "facts" right here ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! Follow the money. Want that fact to go away, it will cost you.

Truth has a liberal bias.

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to forget that the partisanship may be the RESULT of the bullshitting done by "one side", especially in a country where everything is taken personally and as a full-contact commercial sport.

Oh, and for Kohath, do you think that since everyone believes that babies come from mommies' tummy that this is only due to "groupthink"? Or do you think that in the overwhelming number of cases that the group thinks like that because it's in agreement with reality?

Or is that unpossible?

Re:Truth has a liberal bias.

[Karmashock]

You're suggesting that truth be determined by majority vote. Want to hold a poll in Egypt about whether evolution is real or do you see the fucking the problem with putting that sort of thing to a vote?

Its a bad idea.

As to truth having a liberal bias, the truth has no bias what so ever. Presuming your ideology is the source of truth and all other belief systems are false... is what you'll hear from pretty much any fanatic.

Ask a fanatical evangelical christian and they'll tell you that the truth has an evangelical bias. Ask a fanatical muslim and they'll say the truth has an islamic bias. Ask a hardcore communist and they'll say the truth has a communist bias. Ask a hardcore libertarian or capitalist and they'll say the truth has a libertarian or capitalist bias.

You saying the truth has a liberal bias just means you're a fanatical liberal. Thanks for telling me... but now that you've admitted your bias, why should everyone else have your world view forced on them rather than the other way around?

You say because the truth favors you? Everyone says that. *golf clap*

Try again.

Re:Truth has a liberal bias.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're suggesting that the fewer people think a thing is true, the more factual it is.

Just because Peter Sutcliffe believes Jesus Christ told him to kill the women doesn't make it true. Pretty much EVERYONE ON THE PLANET will agree that Peter is wrong there.

And you're saying that that is false?

Try again.

Re:Truth has a liberal bias.

[Karmashock]

No captain strawman, your petty fallacies shall not prevail this day!

*rolls eyes*

Where did I say the fewer people believe a thing the more it is true? That is just as stupid as saying that if lots of people believe something it must be true.

NEITHER popular support nor popular rejection means something must be true or must be false.

Truth is not a popularity contest. Why is this news people? This is fucking science 101. And the very people that like the idea of science ruling everything don't understand the first fucking thing about the underlying philosophy and logic of science.

I listen to you fucksticks on forums all over the internet all the time. And you're always saying something incomprehensibly stupid like "oh well, lots of people think this so it must be true"... really? At one point, a lot of people thought the world was a carpet that god laid out on the ground for his chosen people to live upon. Was that true?

And here you'll say "but its different now because we have science"... yep, we do... but only when we do science do we have science. To have science you have to have evidence and a chain of logic that proves that if X is true that Y is also true. And absent that... you do not have science.

When you read a book that says the earth orbits the sun and you believe that... you did NO science at all. You are not a scientist or a scientific thinker because you did that. What you did was read something in a book and believe it.

Congratulations. You have zero moral superiority over the douchebag that read in his holy book that the world is a carpet. The only difference is that you read out of a different book then he did.

Now am I saying the books are equlivient? Probably not... but then that would have to be examined. I have no idea what fucking book you read. It could be Dr fucking Seuss for all I know.

Science would be testing the theory, understanding the logic behind the theory, possibly reverse engineering the conclusions... etc. And minus that... no science.

Truth works the same way because science is a philosophical system for determining empirical fact in a material universe. And if you want to find a truth... you need to go through a process to find it.

That process at no point includes asking how many people agree with you about a thing unless the truth you are trying to determine is how many people agree on a thing.

If a billion people think the moon is made of cheese... that doesn't mean it is made of cheese. If a billion people think it is made of pulverized rock that coalesced from the debris that ringed our star during the formation of the solar system... well... it isn't true because they think it is true. It is true because it is or is not in and of itself... and extremely indifferent to whatever anyone might think about the subject.

Until humans get magical mind powers that allow them to instantly transform reality to suit their misapprehensions... their opinions mean exactly... dick.

Now was I bit rude here? Yep... but I felt it was only fair given that you opened with a very offensive strawman. Do that and expect to be treated like garbage.

Re:Truth has a liberal bias.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you started with the strawmen, retard!

"You're suggesting that truth be determined by majority vote"

Is a strawman. Reality leads to a majority of people determining that it really IS real. YOU are saying that this cannot be right.

"If a billion people think the moon is made of cheese."

They don't. Therefore not a problem. ANOTHER strawman from you?!?!?!?

Fuck's sake, you complain about a strawman from me, when you've gotten the market on the bastards sewn up for your own private use!

Re:Truth has a liberal bias.

[Karmashock]

No, it wasn't a strawman because you just confirmed that is your position.

Your position is that the majority is ALWAYS right because... ?

So, I didn't strawman you... FUCKtard. You literally said I strawmanned you and then immediately contradicted yourself by adopting the position I had supposidly strawmanned you with... you are a moron.

You're too stupid to have this discussion. Its official.

Good day.

http://heeereswilly.ytmnd.com/

Welp...

[davesque]

There goes theonion.com's search ranking.

And Google's epistemological basis is?

[matbury]

I wonder what the Google staff's and consultants' philosophy of epistemology is. What do they mean when they say fact? What assumptions underly that definition? Are they naive positivists or social constructivists? Ultimately, it requires people to decide what constitutes truth, fact, and knowledge - machines are nowhere near being able to do that and perhaps never will. Do they expect to automate this ranking system with an algorithm? I can't wait to see it trip up over criteria-matching random string generators that regurgitate scraped "facts" off the web (by simply following Google's own "fact" ranking results) to push their porn, malware, and sales/scam/phishing sites up to the top of Google's page rankings.

This post was brought to you by Carls Junior, makers of Brawndo, the thirst mutilator. It's got electrolytes.

Re:And Google's epistemological basis is?

[Anonymous Coward]

How would a site with nothing but pictures rank in a fact based search engine? Would the pixels give it away?

Re:And Google's epistemological basis is?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I think the answer to this is that kittenwars.com would become the number 1 site returned in all searches.

Re:And Google's epistemological basis is?

[Anonymous Coward]

It says that they're trying to use consensus as a proxy for truth, which should tell you everything that you need to know. :-(

wrong date

[mornfall]

I think you intended to post this on the first of April not first of March.

The "web"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same "web" that insists Republicans are the Taliban, Democrats are all secretly affixing a fake Stalin moustache, all men are rapists, and all women are golddigging pussy-pass'd whores?

Thanks, but no thanks.

Easy to deceive

[Anonymous Coward]

This scheme should be easier to manipulate than counting links.

Do a little research, come up with some of those assured facts, and place them all over a webpage. It'd rate high and move to the top of the list. Someone can do that all by themselves, which is easier than getting links.

So how many random facts to promote my page?

[DaphneDiane]

Won't this just encourage SEO sites to include a bunch of trivial facts but easily verifiable facts within page to get a good truth like quality as far as Google is concerned?

Doublethink

[Anonymous Coward]

"Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings." Does anyone *not* see at least one of the multiple problems here?

The government had nothing to do with 9/11 = FACT

[Anonymous Coward]

Conspiracy sights about to go down the memory hole in 3..2...1

Fiction is fiction

[tepples]

I don't see how religion should be treated differently from The Adventures of Pinocchio or The Lord of the Rings or The Time Machine or Gulliver's Travels or something like that.

Re: Fiction is fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it. I'll wait.

Re:Fiction is fiction

[Karmashock]

So you want google to passively block or filter into obscurity all references to religion or fiction? And do you believe anything that isn't a fact?

What about mercy? Is that a fact?

What about justice? Is that a fact?

What about kindness? Is that a fact?

You lack the wisdom to grasp what you're talking about.

Intelligence you can get from reading a book or sitting a class. Wisdom requires experience. It requires making mistakes and learning from them. It requires a depth of character. It requires regret.

Your unqualified statement smells of the callow naive thoughts of the young and foolish.

Re:Fiction is fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying religion should be treated as fact?

Re:Fiction is fiction

[Karmashock]

Are you saying that bunnies are made of chocolate?

See, I can ask stupid questions too. Your question is a sad rhetorical evasion.

Whether or not something is objectively true or contains objective facts is not justification for censoring it.

Do you only look for facts on line? When you go to a library is it only to find facts? When you turn on the tv or open a newspaper is it only to find facts?

What about someone writing reviews for books... are those facts?

Lets say we have a political campaign and the two sides say things... should we censor both sides because both sides are going to tell some half truths at best.

What about if one group of ideologues attacks another group... censor both sides? Or choose sides?

You're entering a fucking minefield here and I'm trying to tell you to stop and get a fucking fucking metal detector before you blow your fucking legs off. This is a terrible idea. Yes, theoretically it would be nice if bullshit were filtered out of the internet. HOWEVER... you can't really separate bullshit from non-bullshit in an empirical, consistent, and non-corruptible fashion.

My problem is not your desire to remove bullshit. My problem is that you can't do it without trolls and shills taking the process over to corrupt the process. And as such, its best to go with something that sucks but at the very least doesn't grant anyone any particular advantage.

I you say anything besides "Oh, now I see what you mean"... then fucking fine... go marching across that minefield Mr Livingston... I'll be over here sipping on a glass of lemonade and an umbrella waiting for the boom... and when the rhetorical shreds of naive misconceptions come raining down upon the field in gory chunks... I will have my umbrella ready.

Good day.

Re:Fiction is fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

> So you want google to passively block or filter into obscurity all references to religion or fiction? And do you believe anything that isn't a fact?

Amusing! Reading someone talking about wisdom, kindness, depth of character who has read something into the original post that manifestly wasn't said, and then being unkind, shallow and actually rather horrible and insulting in their reply!

They made the point that there exists fiction (which contains untruths from an outsider perspective), and there exist religious statements (likewise, for some large set of outsiders). To be able to handle the former - which they surely must - is to be able to handle the latter. That's all.

You read so much into that post that wasn't there that I can't help feel that you were actually talking to yourself, in a sort of Gollum/Smeagol-like debate! But entertaining as it was, I think I'd rather you'd waited until morning before wading in, and had perhaps let the hangover wear off... the internet would have been a nicer place.

Re: Fiction is fiction

[reve_etrange]

And we will wait for you to prove Frodo never carried the One Ring into Mordor.

Re:Fiction is fiction

[Karmashock]

You're accusing me of strawmanning my opposition by inferring that when I opposed Google's idea, and they supported it, that I shouldn't have assumed they were in support of google's move.

As they are in support of it, I can use google's plan against them as if it were their own since they've effectively endorsed it.

Now, you want to talk about wisdom and kindness? Lets try another one... Reasonableness.

You want to have a discussion with me. That starts now if you're game.

Step one. You know my position on this issue. You have not stated your position. I can neither effectively defend myself nor rebut your position in context with the thread unless you make a counter argument.

Waiting on you. I'm a swell guy. I'm sure you're a swell guy. Lets show what swell guys we are by demonstrating that we can have a reasonable discussion on the issue.

What do you say? ;)

Re: Fiction is fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

He carried it into Mordor but the quest failed when he chose to claim the ring instead of destroying it

Re: Fiction is fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not something is objectively true or contains objective facts is not justification for censoring it.

Tell that to google.

Re: Fiction is fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Heavily verified history. There might be a few details up in the air from the parts that weren't recorded as observed (aka - the first part of Genesis) but the vast majority of the text has been verified.

There's a term that I like to use for biblical detractors.

"Bookenders"

Basically, they take the front of the Bible, Genesis, that wasn't written as it was observed and could very easily just be metaphor for communication brevity sake and harp on it as if the observed age of the earth somehow disproves the entire thing. Then they skip to the back, Revelation, for the other non-observed part - the end of the world prophecy stuff.

Everything in the middle is the important part, but Bookenders don't really care about having an informed view point because they'd prefer to cast stones. To find anybody taking issue with Jesus is borderline unfathomable. Love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

One has to wonder about the motivation of anybody who could be against such a thing.

Re: Fiction is fiction

[Karmashock]

You act as if something that huge is something they're just going to get away with... that's bigger then them. If they cross that line... they're going to find a world of pain.

I see a contradiction already

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

If a web page has contradictory information, then the web does not unanimously agree.

Methinks the summary lost something along the way there.

Echo chamber internet

[sigmabody]

Hm... not sure extending the reddit echo chamber effect to the entire effective internet is really a good idea, especially for diversity of ideas.

Then again, as someone else mentioned, there will always be other search engines. Back in the day, Yahoo only showed you the big, popular sites... and then a search engine called google which showed everything.

Re:Echo chamber internet

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be like good comments getting modded down on Slashdot, which does happen.

If the scoring is used to move a link up or down a few places on the page, probably not much harm. Or to link as normal, but to put a knowledge score next to the link, so we know before going to it, that might be better.

As for the other search engine comment, I'm not sure if the others can compete so well.

I'd rather see Google focus on dropping down the rankings of spam sites. The kind that has random English words that make no sense.

The Onion

[Anonymous Coward]

...and satire is handled by an expert system that is manually fed?

I don't see how this is going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Viz@gra!!!!

FACT: Water is blue because it is reflecting our sky.
FACT: Xerox built the first GUI.
FACT: America was founded in 1776

Google is full of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

What they are really after is the worst organic results possible.

Organic results that aren't relevant means what? More ad clicks.

Check their last 20 quarterly reports or so. You'll see a trend of ad click growth that outpaces their overall traffic growth.

You think that's a mistake, coincidence, or a strategy?

I see a logical problem with the proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

So they say that the Knowledge Vault will be used to vet the various pages for veracity, but the content of the Knowledge Vault was scoured from internet sources. Were those sources themselves vetted for reliability? If not, why think they're trustworthy? But if so, by what standard were the sources vetted? It couldn't be the Knowledge Vault, because then we'd be using it to vet itself. But if it was some other authority, how do we judge that it's reliable? Surely not according to the Knowledge Vault, so according to what - some other authority? Etc.

The facts according to Google...

[allfieldsrequired]

I am pretty sure it won't take long before "Fact the web unanimously agrees on" becomes "Facts Google prefers" or even "Facts the US Government tells Google to ignore/promote"

Must be a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

This has got to be a troll.

This is an incredibly bad idea. Monumentally, breathtakingly bad. The liability involved to Google for claiming that a web page presented on their search engine has been 'fact checked' and is factually accurate is staggering. Multiply this times the billions of pages checked by Google on a regular basis and they might as well turn off the lights and go home because the lawsuits will be never ending.

This can not possibly be real.

Not a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Who exactly decides what is a fact or not? I can't imagine this being impartial.

I think they should stick to what works. If the search results are inferior in any way this could be the thing that eventually kills Google.

What about snopes.com?

[tgibson]

Context plays a role in assessing factual information. What if my site documents historical inaccuracies (the world is flat) or catalogs conspiracy theories? Or what about slashdot itself in which "facts" are regularly debated in the comments?

Wonder how they'll rate Global Warming discussions

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... when there is more than one version of the truth (conflicts, spin vs fact)... plus not all information is facts... philosophical questions may have more than one answer etc... so I am definitely curious to see how this works out.

I'm curious as well.

In particular, I wonder how they'll handle Global Warming / Climate Change discussions.

Then there's electoral politics, economics, Illegal immigration / undocumented migrants, ...

Comparing to a knowlege base presupposes that the knowledge base is full of truth. Filtering search results to exclude (or down-rate) anything at odds with the current paradigm is a recipe for hamstriging research, debate, and intellectual progress

  Ideas need to be supported or rejected based on evidence and logic, not whether they're orthodox.

Mr. Moynihan should have read on the

[aussersterne]

problems of epistemology, including in science.

Note that there are no shortage of facts whose veracity depends on nuanced facets of context and condition, some of which are disputed.

For example, fact or not: "Linux is a difficult operating system to use, and is a better choice for geeks and hackers than for regular users."

Or how about:

"Android is an operating system written by Google."

Or how about:

"The Bermuda Triangle region has seen an unusually high number of ship and plane disappearances over the years, and may be a particularly dangerous place to travel."

Because unless Google's algorithms are very, very nuanced in their approach, each of these is going to be seen as carrying high levels of factuality based on the preponderance of content out there, particularity in high-authority sources.

Of course, statements like the first and third are too complex for Google's rankings to evaluate and rank, and it can only work with very simple assertions on the order of "Milk is white," or "Obama is a Democrat," the it's going to do practically nothing (good or bad) at all for the rankings, since facts with this level of consensus are generally undisputed, even by those that promote falsehoods.

Useless before... useless after?

[Torp]

Does a search engine that doesn't try to guess what i'd like to see and gives me generic results not tailor made for me exist any more?

Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

" but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them."

Just remove the links to wikipedia and 80% of these cases are gone.

Actually

[thisisauniqueid]

Actually, Google stopped using PageRank as their main ranking signal a long time ago. Their latest "Hummingbird" engine still has PageRank in the mix somewhere, but even Google engineers talk about it like it's basically a non-PageRank algorithm at this point. There are so many layers of complex ranking and anti-gaming heuristics and scoring functions and other black magic that the summary of this article is based on an incorrect premise.

Re:Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

One way to test this theory would be to see if sites can rank solely on the basis of links.

Let's see....search for:

buy viagra
cure for cancer
cheap rolex

Yep. Google is full of shit. It's all about the links.

well there goes...

[Anonymous Coward]

wikipedia's pagerank.

Facts the web unanimously agrees on are.....

[drolli]

considered a reasonable proxy for truth.

I am screaming in horror.

Re: Facts the web unanimously agrees on are.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part is sites with questionable content might not be in this knowledge base of theirs, which is pretty awful if true.

How else is 4chan supposed to spread their knowledge to the world? People must know!

Devolving?

[Tablizer]

While the early search engines indexed largely based on content, Google primarily used hyperlinks to index. And most found it better, making Google the king. It's how they Won the West. Now they are going back to content-centric indexing?

Links are more democracy-like, "facts" ...

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, based on Google facts does God exists?

Horrible and dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

That means that one man telling the truth will always lose against two lyers. New theory? -- false, does not agree with what the web says. I'm happy it did not exist when Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

The Onion

[Anonymous Coward]

How will people ever find their daily dose of in-depth reporting again?

Re:NO

[Sudline]

The 6) if false, even if a common predecessor, that of human was not an ape.

Ministry of Truth anybody?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a self-accelerating mechanism making humans converge on one agreed-upon truth. Tweak its aim, and you tweak the truth. How this works can be seen with Wikipedia. And Wikipedia will likely be considered mostly trustworthy to start with.

This is a wet dream of 1984-loving politicians.

We are all niche.

[Anonymous Coward]

Infinitely this.

I don't understand why people think WE matter. We are worthless.

No, your use of adblock and a million other extensions means nothing. You are worthless to those companies by default.
This is why it is pointless for you to put the effort in if you are doing it for paranoias sake.

We are all simply a niche that very few advertising companies care about.

This Google focus has always bugged me.

[Qbertino]

I use Google regularly, but I never forget that it's a search engine. Nothing less and nothing more. People who rely on their Google rank for business are going to wake up some day to a big disappointment. A whole generation of users mistaking Google for the web, or even the internet is completely annoying.

If Google wants to change their system, it's their business. If Google can't find a site that I'm looking for, even though the searchterms are distinct and the site offers exactly what I want, it's Google fault, not the fault of the site builder.

We need to educate the ordinary people that Google is one of many search engines. The best perhaps and pretty good most of the time, but only a search engine. That internet traffic goes down by 60% whenever Google is offline simply because people don't get that is scary.

Can't have the truth getting out, can we...

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth will be redefined as 'not factual', according to 'the web'. LOL.

Actually, you ARE an ape.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hairless and not as strong and a few other genetic differences of a negligible measure (compared to intraspecies differences elsewhere), but still an ape.

You're an ape. Your mom's an ape, your dad's an ape.

None of them were monkeys.

BTW, what's better about coming from a bit of dirt? At least an ape doesn't get swept up and chucked in the bin...

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we NEED to know "the other side"? Do we need to know that the earth is flat? That pi=3? That the House of Windsor are lizard aliens taking over the world? That Jesus told Peter Sutcliffe to kill those women? That ISIS are fighting for the religious freedom of muslims from the evil capitalists of the west?

Do we NEED to know them?

No.

Google isn;t going round deleting your information on the age of the earth being 10,000 years old. It just won't appear high in a list of searches "how old is the earth?", but WILL appear with the search "is the earth 10000 years old?".

1 in 5 ARE.

[Anonymous Coward]

It merely requires a sufficiently lax definition of sexual assault.

You see, the conclusion relies on the questionnaire, and it's easy to see in that that the definition includes "Was unhappy being told you weren't having sex with him, so you had sex", and so forth.

Then again, along with your "you'll see some widely quoted falsehood" you'll also see someone point out the above fact too.

So tell me how groupthink is going to happen here.

Then what about fiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you're looking for a story about Spock? Its all fiction.

Great!

[mark_reh]

Does this mean that fewer people will be sent to medical/dental misinformation sites, or is the fact checking software unable to verify information by searching through peer reviewed journals?

This ought to get the young earth/evolution deniers panties all twisted up!

April 1 came a month early this year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatically determining facts from natural language text based on how often the assertion appears in the web?
This seems like an early April Fools joke. Or a great way to propagate & validate popular bogus urban legends.

No, they KNEW it was not flat

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has ever seen actual land can see it's not flat. Hills. Mountains. River valleys. And so on.

Those living on it don't really care what shape the world is.

Just because the book of myth you're most knowledgable of said the earth was flat (or round, which some maintain means spherical, if so, then even then they knew it was spherical not flat) doesn't mean that the people knew or cared what the shape of the WORLD was: they knew the land itself wasn't flat.

My personal metric

[justthinkit]

Good choice.

My personal metric will be any web page that doesn't contain the string "silentcoder".

Re:My personal metric

[Neil Boekend]

You know you can append your search with "-silentcoder" to exclude all results that contain the string "silentcoder", right?

Re:NO

[silentcoder]

>The 6) if false, even if a common predecessor, that of human was not an ape.

The common ancestor of all homo species was an ape. So was the earlier common ancestor of humans AND chimps.
It was the chimplike ancestor of man, and at the same time the man-like ancestor of chimps.

It was a primate without a tail - it was an ape.
Even further back we shared a common ancestor with gorrillas, further than that with orangs and much further than that with monkeys.

One word

[Anonymous Coward]

Censorship

Re:Wonder how they'll rate Global Warming discussi

[itzly]

In particular, I wonder how they'll handle Global Warming / Climate Change discussions.

That's a simple one. There's not really a dispute there.

DuckDuckGo

[BlackHawk-666]

I've switched to using DuckDuckGo. They seem less evil than Google, for now.

Yes, it WAS a strawman.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere near a billion people think the moon is made of cheese.

And I never said nor did I confirm that my post was "suggesting that truth be determined by majority vote", because that isn't what Google is doing here: it's rating the reliability of a page to how much is generally agreed by those able to make a determination as being factually supported.

Frigging retarded motherfucking moron that you are, you blatter out your own strawmen then whine and bitch about what you THINK is a strawman from me.

EVEN IF IT IS a strawman, you CANNOT whine and bitch when you're pinching out a loaf of strawmanning yourself at the same fucking time.

Then again, you're a denier moron, so what the hell was I expecting from you? Rational thought is verboten for you if it doesn't confirm yourself as right by "gut feeling".

Re:Yes, it WAS a strawman.

[Karmashock]

That was an example of some stupid thing that people have believed. Since on top of being a fascist you don't understand what analogies or strawmen are... you're again clearly too stupid to have this discussion.

Good day.

unit tests for liars

[Anonymous Coward]

While nearly anything may be better than ignorant people posting propaganda that with a little checking looks like total garbage. But what if a little checking becomes insufficient to tell because of this.

Did *everyone* miss the point here? :-(

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Oh, the irony!

Erm... It was intended to be ironic. Well, paradoxical, technically. Compare my final sentence

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

with the classic "This statement is false".

If my statement were true, it would illustrate a problem with Google's proposal.

But as my statement is false, it is itself a demonstration of the problem, because it perpetuates a myth sufficiently popular that it even has its own Wikipedia page. I was a little surprised that I couldn't also find it on Snopes.

Anyway, it's disappointing that no-one seems to have noticed that. Were none of you even a little suspicious about a post that in one paragraph said "Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct" and then repeated one of the most popular myths there is? Really?

Re:Did *everyone* miss the point here? :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

"This statement is false".

I stated something similar up above. However, now that I think about it we have it wrong.

You see there are 2 pieces of information here. There is the statement and the data inside the statement. The statement itself is true. However the datum inside the statement is false. There is a 'hidden' piece of information. Hmm this is an interesting result. I shall have to ponder it...

Re:Did *everyone* miss the point here? :-(

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It remains the case that either my original statement is true, meaning a counter-example for the reliability of fact-based ranking has been identified, or my original statement is false, in which case the statement itself becomes a counter-example because it is widely repeated but incorrect.

A bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a bad, poorly thought out idea due to the number of websites out there dedicated to fiction (media.) Attempting to sort by "factual" content would leave a lot of them out of the lists.

For instance, searching for mythological (non-existent) creatures. Are they factual, NO, then any website mentioning unicorns, pegasi, gryphons or other mythological creatures would find their rankings suffering, despite the content matter being "factual." What about websites dedicated to authors who write fantasy and science fiction. How do you verify the veracity of a site dedicated to a fictional universe?

Or more importantly, opinion?

This isn't a good idea. In fact, it gives Google the ability to censor under the guise of accuracy. Your opinion is WRONG, thus it must not be FACTUAL, thus we can't link it.

Anyone lauding this idea is an idiot.

Sarcasm

[Anonymous Coward]

How will it rate a sarcastic comment? By what it literally says? Or what it is implying?

"Fact" means canon

[tepples]

So you want google to passively block or filter into obscurity all references to religion or fiction?

If something is consensus within the canon of a particular fictional world, Google should treat it as consensus in that context. This shouldn't change whether the world is that of The Bible or The Silmarillion.

Re:"Fact" means canon

[Karmashock]

So... fact to you means "the consensus opinion" which means you want to censor all minority opinion to better preserve your own group think?

This is at best naive foolishness and at worst literal fascism.

This is either a dumb idea or a terrible idea... or some combination of the two.

Prepare to watch snopes.com plummet to obscurity

[fair_n_hite_451]

How will this new ranking system assess pages which contain lies strictly for the purpose of debunking them?

Oh yeah - Who decides what facts are wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

e.g. Israel ethnic cleansing Palestinians?

Politics Aside, This Sounds like a Good Way to

[BCtoo]

freeze advancement and innovation. Nothing new is accepted as fact until a critical point occurs. That critical point can't happen until/unless enough people are exposed to the new fact.

What about humor? What about fiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this algorithm push them down to page 40 of the results?

And, interestingly, will it identify "Greedo shot first" as a lie?

Stinks to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, who will be the judge of what it correct not incorrect or, more appropriately, truth and a lie?

Let the link method stand and I will determine what is true and not true for myself. I don't need Google, or any other political entity, acting as watchdog over what I read.

Semantic Web?

[MichaelJSynnott]

This is an excellent idea - but isn't it a roundabout realisation of the 'Semantic Web' Tim Berners-Lee was talking about 15+ years ago?

Use this simple trick to get "facts"

[Anonymous Coward]

I use this filter:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-easy-ways-to-spot-b.s.-news-story-internet

Does Google's plan mean that naturalnews.com will disappear from google searches?
If it did nothing else, that would make me happy.

What's fact?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know.
Let's ask the NSA...

misguided

[micahraleigh]

I'm more interested in value than facticity.

"... to pursue objectivity is to be in error."
Kierkegaard/Climacus

"There are no facts. Just opinions."
Nietchze

Authoritarian Fact Finder?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not trust Google, or any other company, to be the verification of correct facts on a spectrum that broad. This would very likely be the death of the internet as a self-organizing evolution of knowledge. I'd probably start performing a backup search in another browser when this hit, and maybe even cease using google over this.

I don't think they've thought it out...

[Gestahl]

There seems to be an implicit assumption that people *want* the truth.

Seems to me that Google is going to have to decide whether they are first and foremost a social-engineering-through-better-technology company, or a company that sells ads. I think this would likely bring this contradiction to a head.

Why not both?

[volmtech]

Couldn't Google search results alternate between link based and fact based?

FACT: The Internet is For...

[allquixotic]

The Internet is for porn. It's universally accepted, so therefore it must be true!

Now all libraries are getting bumped way down on the page rankings because they claim in their "About Us" page, something along the lines of, the Internet is a place for gaining knowledge, communicating ideas, etc. etc.

So differing opinions will be banned from Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

While there is an apparent reality out there, everyone seems to have very different views on what that reality consists of, and means for all of us.

Establishing "facts" is very difficult -- the Internet can't even agree what color a white-and-gold dress is!

Academics, in particular, already face an uphill climb getting exposure to their findings.

Having the Internet become a "Cliff's Notes" version of "reality" offers no appeal to me.

Bad Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the place of a search engine (or rather the people controlling that search engine) to determine reality on behalf of the users - their singular job is to sift through whatever shit someone is searching for, not to limit information on anything other than search parameters.

Re:Wonder how they'll rate Global Warming discussi

[Ungrounded Lightning]

In particular, I wonder how they'll handle Global Warming / Climate Change discussions.

That's a simple one. There's not really a dispute there.

Q.E.D.

definition

[jmcvetta]

fact
[fakt]
noun
Google's opinion.
"it is a well known fact that universal panoptic surveillance is good for free society and democracy"
synonyms: reality, actuality, certainty, power;

What next

[Anonymous Coward]

Google wants to rank websites based on TRUTH not Facts.
http://www.nagaiah.com/google.html

In Soviet Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia Google searches you. Wait.

Spammers are Scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Grass is green. BUY VIAGRA CHEAP! Mt. Everest is 29,028 feet tall. ONLINE PHARMACY. Chickens lay eggs. CLICK HERE. The population of the United States is increasing.

Bleh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need help searching based on rank when I can narrow down results to a handful using search operators. I can see why they want to when there are people that actually believe ONN to be true.

FACTS vs. TRUTH

[Anonymous Coward]

So, can I expect religious websites to now be at the bottom?

Something tells me Google isn't interested in TRUTH

What about debunking?

[Anonymous Coward]

For instance, Snopes is filled in incorrect items, that it goes on to debunk. Will all those pages get knocked down?

Likewise, what source will they use to determine what is and isn't fact? How will this effect politics? Facts tend to get rather murky on either side of the fence when it comes to different things.

Yro

[mgf64]

Google already tracks users and presents them search results compatible with their beliefs. This will be more and more about not challenging "accepted dogma" as truthful often means. cfr "accepted truth" which ceases to be "truth" as soon as FOIA documents prove that history was quite different than what was the "truth" published on newspapers or shown on TV. Google gets more and more unsound, to the point that if you base your research of factual truth on Google you risk confirmation bias.