Posted on 03/01/2015 7:24:23 AM PST by 9thLife
THE internet is stuffed with garbage...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....
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.
...LazyTruth is a browser extension that skims inboxes to weed out the fake or hoax emails...Emergent, a project from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, pulls in rumours from trashy sites, then verifies or rebuts them ...
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.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Nothing but the truth"
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Of course. Any information that goes against their “facts” is clearly a lie...
Then someone will make a fortune offering a program that inverts the google results.
Or the "facts" as measured by online information, which is malleable and will produce feedback-loops, similar to "flashmobs" only deeper and longer.
Among the problems is the lack of competition, now enshrined in Federal Diktat.
The Founders would be very concerned, I think.
Understand, these people believe there’s no such thing as truth, which really means there’s no such thing as facts. Everything is determined by the ‘narrative’ or by consensus usage.
We are entering a truly Dark Age.
I haven’t used google in years and it’ll be a cold day in hell if I ever use it again.
Substituting the free market of ideas with the reign of what a very, very few believe is the correct way to think.
A little disruption in the right places will avert like a strong breeze does a cloud of gnats.
So what facts will they include?
1. If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.
2. Man-made global warming must be stopped immediately to prevent the destruction of the planet.
3. Al Gore invented the internet.
I liked duckduckgo.com
I just changed my browser’s default to search to be StartPage.
Thanks. Can’t stand bing. Might be better, but I lose patience before I can find the good in it.
Startpage is headquartered in the Netherlands, and supposedly does not collect ip addresses or your search history.
It uses the Google search database and provides results just as if it were done thru google search directly.
Its fairly much all I use.
As for Google being a nasty company -
It was reported last week that the FCC net neutrality vote was influenced by Google lobbying.
And recall that Obola, Hitlery and Dems in general have been lamenting the availability of information to us US subjects, that contradicted official Left wing narrative.
My guess is that the FCC’s hooks into governing the internet will one way or another give Dems just what they’ve wanted: An Internet Fairness Doctrine, ie: control over all online information, marginalize opposing points of view, disappear inconvenient facts.
Its 1984.
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