The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up the positions of Google if the search giant begins to quantify quality by facts, not only links

THE world wide web is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination sites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” reports spread like wildfire. Google has formulated a fix – rank sites based on their truthfulness.

Pages that lots of other websites link to are rated higher.

That model to gauge the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its standing on the other side of the internet is being adapted by a Google research team. Rather than counting incoming links, the system – which isn’t live – counts the amount of facts that are wrong within a page. “A source that’s few bogus facts is regarded as trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for every page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

Web pages which contain contradictory advice are demoted down the ranks.

There are tons of programs that attempt to help web users unearth the reality. Emergent, a job from the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, pulls in rumours from websites that are trashy, then rebuts or checks them by cross referencing to other sources.

LazyTruth programmer Matt Stempeck, now the manager of civic media at Microsoft New York, needs to develop software that exports the knowledge found in fact-checking account services including Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org in order that everyone has easy accessibility to then. He says tools like LazyTruth are not useless but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning that advice is more difficult. “How can you correct people’s misconceptions? Folks get quite defensive,” Stempeck says. “If they are trying to find the reply on Google they might be in a considerably more open state.”