Google plans to rank pages by "truthfulness"

[trevbus]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... links.html

I wonder if it has occurred to Google that many things which are not even strictly true are of great interest, such as mythology, art, literary fiction and religion?

[MrAmsterdam]

"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."

Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources

Xin Luna Dong, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Kevin Murphy, Van Dang, Wilko Horn, Camillo Lugaresi, Shaohua Sun, Wei Zhang
(Submitted on 12 Feb 2015)
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 facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors made in the extraction process from factual errors in the web source per se, by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model. We call the trustworthiness score we computed Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). On synthetic data, we show that our method can reliably compute the true trustworthiness levels of the sources. We then apply it to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimate the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. Manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method.

Don't think for yourself, let a bunch of algorithms do it for you!

[Melusine]

Wow... and who/what decides what is 'true'?

Meanwhile... the 'Health Ranger' has just announced the launch of a new search engine that 'favors New Media while banning corporate and government propaganda'... Could be interesting? It's called Good Gopher.

May 28 Natural News article is here.

Edit: I wonder how Google would rate Miles Mathis' iconoclastic theory (from April this year) that Stephen Hawking has died and been replaced Very good read here if you haven't seen it already.

[Bomb20]

Stephen Hawking has died and been replaced

In fact he was stuffed.

[scowie]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW7Op86ox9g

sry