

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links - voyweb
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VPQ66bOsX1g

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panarky
Some facts are easy, like "capital of albania" or "population of shenzhen" or
"age of clint eastwood".

But is consensus the right answer for more interesting facts? Does the
consensus give the right answer for "minimum wage effect on economy" or "do
firearms make us safer" or "crime rate of immigrants"?

Will Google localize their facts? For a question like "us supporting nazis in
ukraine", will Russian residents get one answer while US residents get a
different answer?

The old Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia had different facts for different
countries. In the US edition, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, while the
British version said it was Sir Joseph Swan.

As Bill Gates famously wrote[1], "The facts depend on where you are coming
from".

Google Maps used to show different national borders depending on where the
user was located[2], maybe it still does. Chinese users saw Arunachal Pradesh
as part of China, while Indian users saw it as part of India.

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20120629032909/http://www.btimes...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120629032909/http://www.btimes.co.za/97/0406/tech/tech6.htm)

[2] [http://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-change-on-google-
maps-d...](http://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-change-on-google-maps-
depending-on-where-you-view-them/)

~~~
sparkzilla
To make matters worse, much of Google's Knowledge Graph -- their database of
facts -- is taken from Wikipedia. There are many problems with this approach.
Wikipedia facts are often unreliable. They are easy to vandalize. Many pages
are unchanged for years because editor numbers are rapidly declining. Pages
are also easy to game, both by external forces (spammers) and internal forces
(bias seekers).

Wikipedia editors are now working as Google's unpaid fact checkers. It's true
that people edit Wikipedia for a variety of reasons, but for many contributors
the site was supposed to be a free resource: contributed to for free with the
promise that the content would be free to the reader and free of advertising.
Instead it is being used to further Google's profit.

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logn
Ha. SEO is about to get a lot easier. SEO is search engine optimization. Easy
is an adjective and is the opposite of hard. "Ha" is an expression of
laughter.

~~~
mearly87
"A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," \-- this
leads me to believe that the algorithm punishes for including false statements
rather than reward for including true statements, so this method wouldn't work

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ben_pr
What is "fact" is actually highly subjective and puts Google in the place of
picking the "winners" for arguments or perhaps pushing their own political and
religious agenda.

Fact: Vaccines are Dangerous Fact: Vaccines are Safe and prevent spread of
deadly diseases. Fact: I nearly died from a vaccine. Fact: Vaccines contained
mercury[1] for decades and poisoned untold millions of people. Fact: Google
now decides which facts you get to see.

I understand Google is trying to get rid of lots of useless add pages but
determining "truth" is potentially just pushing an agenda and burying those
facts they disagree with.

[1][http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability...](http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228)

~~~
WalterSear
Someone, somewhere has to make that call: the current situation is untenable.

~~~
robsears
It's a whole lot more tenable than appointing a referee, which is what Google
is trying to become here. An organization with the power to "settle"
contentious debates becomes a target for corruption, a single point of failure
for the integrity of the entire system.

For example, maybe the Waltons decide they don't like the national
conversation on minimum wage laws; could they lobby/bribe/extort/whatever
their way into having their "facts" be treated favorably in search results?

Or could the Democratic party decide that Republican candidate so-and-so is a
pedophile/spouse-beater/alien, and make that a settled "fact" by promising
Google employees favorable tax breaks in exchange for aid in "narrative
building?"

Under the current system, "facts" are democratized. Sure, sometimes bullshit
makes its way into the popular consciousness, but it's more random than not.
When I see some tripe about "OBAMA TO INJECT TRACKING CHIPS INTO AMERICANS
USING THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK," I'm relieved to know that there is no amount of
money or power in this world to make that an established "fact."

------
blueflow
While i like to see some certain sites removed, i fear that this could give
google too much power of what is considered "truth" and what not. Does anyone
knows good literature about such things and their implications?

~~~
snarfy
It might make google's results less relevant. People don't believe in the
truth. They follow the general consensus. They might switch to a different
search engine because google 'gives bad results'. Mob mentality is real.

~~~
cwyers
According to the article, Google's measure of truth is actually a measure on
consensus. Which I find rather troubling.

~~~
Veedrac
In a sense, it already is. The link-based ranking system is a measure of
popularity.

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wbillingsley
This sounds like an inverse information measure -- ranking sites highly based
on their redundancy (repeated content).

And the people who are in the business of repeating their content in ever more
inventive and adaptive ways are advertisers. So over time this seems likely to
devolve into promoting the adverts and infomercials ahead of the content.

For instance rather than farming links, the spammers would switch to farming
quotes or paraphrases. Expect "one weird trick..." to turn up a lot outside of
just the advertising box, and the battle to be how then to stop the algorithms
from classing it as truthy.

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harperlee
So if they count the absolute number of errors in a page, that's yet another
incentive to cut content in even more pages, that drive even more ads, and
even more profit for Google.

On the other hand, if they count the relative truth in a page, pages will
bloat with marginal content, will get harder to read, people will scan them
more shallowly, and as a result we will end up having different versions of
the same content page but with marginal content tilted on one direction or
another. So we will need to use more web search. So another win for Google.

Sounds fair :)

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tgrass
Google makes money (via ads) by showing the results the user wants, not by
showing the results the user should want. If I want to go to an anti-
vaccination site to reinforce my pre-pre-existing beliefs, it's hard to
imagine Google will care, let alone make it more difficult to find it.

------
billyhoffman
The thought of websites doing "fact stuffing" at the bottom of a page instead
of keyword stuffing makes me smile.

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josefresco
Better title "Google is _researching ways_ to rank websites based on facts
_along with_ links"

Not as sexy, but a bit more accurate.

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josephjrobison
This is an interesting case, and will probably be useful in some verticals,
but not all. It's widely thought and sometimes verified by Google that they
treat different verticals differently in search. "Payday loans" searches are
treated differently from "New Macbook Air" for example, in which case we don't
have to see it as an all or nothing approach. For example, today you only get
the right-hand knowledge box on some searches, but not all.

I also wonder how New Scientist blanketing their page with ads like it's 2003
is affecting their rankings?

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markbnj
>> Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for
truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the
rankings.

But if there are contradictory sites then the web is not in unanimous
agreement, is it? Something about this statement bothers me. Is there no
chance that the web could be in "unanimous agreement" about something which is
wrong? Seems to me that human populations make this mistake quite often, and
since it is humans (for the most part) who write the web the same fallibility
should show up there.

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adunn
The article makes it sounds like they are replacing PageRank. According to the
paper it's orthogonal to PageRank. It's just another signal to consider. The
other assumption seems to be that this will cause site authors to fact-stuff.
However it sounds like they more interested in using wrong facts to penalize a
site than using correct facts to promote a site.

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hudell
Is it just me or are google results getting worse with time? Five or six years
ago I used to find everything on the first page of the first search, but these
days I have to keep "rephrasing" my searches to find what I want.

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antjanus
Anddd this is why I no longer use Google but rely on DuckDuckGo.

~~~
frik
So you use Yahoo.com which itself uses Bing.com.

DuckDuchGo (DDG) is a meta search engine that relies on the Yahoo & Yandex
search API
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_BOSS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_BOSS))
and adds some related Wikipedia/Yelp/Yummly/etc. snips.

So if Bing.com implements a similar rank algorithms your DDG/Yahoo results
will too.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo)

~~~
aeykie
It's meta-searchengine-ness is exactly why I personally use it. A `!` away
from any search engine I need.

~~~
frik
True.

An open search engine was on "Show HN" on Saturday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9122397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9122397)
-> [https://deusu.org](https://deusu.org)

Another open search engine from last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152839)
-> [http://www.gigablast.com](http://www.gigablast.com)

The European Union sponsored the development of an European Google competitor:
[http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Quaero-Erster-
Vorlaeu...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Quaero-Erster-Vorlaeufer-
der-europaeischen-Suchmaschine-110725.html) ->
[https://www.exalead.com/search/](https://www.exalead.com/search/)

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bjr-
I wonder how this will affect media companies' pagerank.

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tempodox
I wonder how the Goog will gauge the facts that Google sucks and that Google
does evil.

