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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."
Uh. My first result for "Electric Component" is the Wikipedia page on electric components. I'm pretty sure your issue is malware, not Google.
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.
You know you can append your search with "-silentcoder" to exclude all results that contain the string "silentcoder", right?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.