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. 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."
This article appeared in print under the headline "Nothing but the truth"
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