Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links
Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links
28 February 2015 by Hal Hodson
The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up
Google's rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not
just links
THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination
websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free "news" stories
spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to
their truthfulness.
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.
A 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
(arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). 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.
There are already lots of apps that try to help internet
users unearth the truth. LazyTruth is a browser extension that skims inboxes to
weed out the fake or hoax emails that do the rounds. Emergent, a project from
the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, pulls
in rumours from trashy sites, then verifies or rebuts them by cross-referencing
to other sources.
LazyTruth developer Matt Stempeck, now the director of
civic media at Microsoft New York, wants to develop software that exports the
knowledge found in fact-checking services such as Snopes, PolitiFact and
FactCheck.org so that everyone has easy access to them. He says tools like
LazyTruth are useful online, but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning
that information is harder. "How do you correct people's misconceptions?
People get very defensive," Stempeck says. "If they're searching for
the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state."
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