Once Again Google is changing the rules!

Hi everyone,

I stumbled on a very good article on Google's New Upcoming Idea. The article is well written with examples:

The huge implications of Google’s idea to rank sites based on their accuracy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environm...

I extracted parts of the article to summarize it. :)

«For some time, those of us studying the problem of misinformation in U.S. politics — and especially scientific misinformation — have wondered whether Google could come along and solve the problem in one fell swoop.

After all, if Web content were rated such that it came up in searches based on its actual accuracy — rather than based on its link-based popularity — then quite a lot of misleading stuff might effectively get buried.

The reason is that a team of Google researchers recently published a mathematics-heavy paper documenting their attempts to evaluate vast numbers of Web sites based upon their accuracy. As they put it:

• The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.

The Intersect note, this does not mean Google is actually going to do this or put in place such a ranking system for searches. It means it’s studying it.

The new paper draws on a prior Google project called the Knowledge Vault, which has compiled more than a billion facts so far by grabbing them from the Web and then comparing them with existing sources.

For 271 million of these facts, the probability of actual correctness is over 90 percent, according to Google.

The new study, though, goes farther. It draws on the Knowledge Vault approach to actually evaluate pages across the Web and determine their accuracy.

Through this method, the paper reports, an amazing 119 million Web pages were rated.

One noteworthy result, the researchers note, is that Gossip sites and Web forums in particular don’t do very well — they end up being ranked quite low, despite their popularity.

The problem in the U.S. over the past decade in particular, however, is that everyone does seem to have his own facts — at least around certain politicized topics. But if anyone can bring us back to a shared reality, well, it’s Google.»

My Personal Opinion

It might or might not happen....my guess it will. Ok, I will say it. It might solve or erase a few debates on some «famous conspiracies».

It will also mean that Google will decide what is real or fake on the web! This is quite a big power to have.

Enjoy and keep up the good work.

Gilbert