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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."
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!
*cough* Fox News *coughcough*