Google: Just the Facts, Folks
March 2, 2015
Short honk: I read “Google Wants to Rank Websites Based on Facts Not Links.” The article could be a jumping off point for some dictionary excitement. The article reports:
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.
A couple of questions come to my tiny mind:
- What is a fact?
- When two documented facts conflict, which fact is more correct? Example: competing theories in physics about dark matter.
- What is knowledge?
- Will Google be able to manage knowledge is a manner that satisfies “experts”?
The PageRank thing drives so much ad cash because statistical funkiness seems to make intuitive sense for popularity rankings. Will facts generate equivalent financial excitement?
I suppose Google could license Watson and just ask IBM’s system? Here’s what the questions might look like:
Watson, what’s a fact? What’s knowledge? What’s accurate information?
And Watson’s answer, “Tamarind.”
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2015
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