Wait til Google gets a hold of a web page and decides how far down a rabbit hole it end up.
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.
Yep... put a bunch of liberals in charge of judging what is truthful....gee...wonder how that’s gonna work out?
That's from this NewScientist article.
I've noticed of late that for a query which appears to have a definite answer, Google will put an answer box at the top of the results. E.g., search for Israel Christian population or density of osmium or New York to Moscow flight time and see what comes up.
Look for search engine spammers to start sprinkling their garbage with odd concrete facts.
If they start doing what that article suggests, they should add search tools to (a) turn it off and (b) invert it, i.e., rank the least truthy pages higher.