Google wants to remove all lies from the internet

A new report from The New Scientist has revealed that Google is interested in the idea of ranking websites based on facts, not merely the prevalence of incoming links.

This will mean links containing lies will nolonger be popular with the search engine.

The researchers at the company believe they can clean up the internet and make veracity a rankable priority in search terms.

Google ranks web pages based on the number of incoming links they receive. The assumption is that the more links a page has, the more important it must be on the web. The algorithm has been adjusted and modified hundreds or thousands of times over the years, of course, but incoming links are still a huge part of what determines any site’s ranking in a search.

Google’s engineers adjust the algorithm periodically in hopes of making sure it returns the highest quality searches, not simply the most popular sites.

Google has devised a method/model that measures the “truthfulness” of a web page instead of its online reach. The new system could count the number of “facts” in the page. Each source is then analysed for how many lies it has and scored on that using something called a “Knowledge-Based Trust” score.

Google used its “Knowledge Vault” to qualify the information. That’s the company’s giant database of information, vetted facts and research.

The lie detector isn’t live yet and it’s unlikely to launch any time soon.

Credit: BI